Are the calorie burn counts on ellipticals accurate?
It asks for your weight, and monitors HR, but is the calories burned count actually accurate on ellipticals?
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No measurement of any kind is ever exact; there’s always uncertainty. In this case, if the Heart Rate is fed into the calorie calculation, that would be one source of uncertainty. The machine could be geared towards the stats of the ‘average’ user, whatever that is.
If so, a super-endurance-athlete, like Lance Armstrong, would have a lower HR from the same exercise than a typical young man with the same body weight. And the machine would say that Lance burned fewer calories than the other guy.
Or the machine may be programmed to give you a grossly inflated calorie burn figure. Why? To give you the comforting illusion that you’ve just burned off a zillion calories. And to give you a false sense of ‘customer satisfaction’ with owning a machine that allows you to burn off a zillion calories in 20 minutes.
Would there be any legal consequences for selling a machine that gives inflated ‘data’ about calories burned? Probably not. You get the fudged data *after* you buy the machine; so there’s no possibility of fraud in the narrow sense of the word.
However there may be a kernel of truth mixed in with the probable flimflam. If the machine’s figures say that you burned 10% more calories in today’s workout than you did yesterday, that may be accurate.