Calorie burning on a turbo trainer

pottssteve

Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone had any information on the number of calories burned per hour on a turbo trainer for specific cadences and gear ratios. Obviously, individuals would vary depending on their mass (I assume), basal metabolic rate, percentage muscle/fat and factors such as air and body temperature. However, any sort of ballpark figures might be useful in helping me to maintain motivation!

Thanks,
Steve

imposter2.0

Too many variables there (including effort/power, which you didn't mention) to make any such calculation anything more than a completely random guess. Maybe try to explain what it is you are trying to achieve?

pottssteve

Imposter wrote:

Too many variables there (including effort/power, which you didn't mention) to make any such calculation anything more than a completely random guess. Maybe try to explain what it is you are trying to achieve?

I thought as much. I want to know how long I have to pedal in order to be "calorie neutral" while drinking one beer (Stella Artois, 330ml), which I understand is 154 calories, or thereabouts.

webboo

I think it about 24 hours :twisted




My heart rate Monitor reckons about 400 an hour based on my age,weight, height and sex. But again that depends on what session I'm doing.

AK_jnr

1200 calories an hour whether you are in Z1 or Z6. If you wrap cling film around your belly like in Full Monty thats another 400 calories.

cougie

Get a power Meter and that'll help you.

Fwiw I do sessions that burn about 600kj an hour - I'm sweating buckets with two Fans on.

You'd be better off just not having that beer. It's far easier to not eat drink so much than it is to burn it off

sungod

if you have the power curve for the tutbo you can extrapolate power from 'speed', or get a commercial product that does the same, for instance...

http://www.powercurvesensor.com/cycling ... er-curves/

it is not as accurate as a powermeter, but probably will get you within 10% once the turbe has warmed up

even if you just print the powercurve out and then hold a speed, you can do the calculation

one watt for one second is one joule, there's about 0.24 cal/joule, but the human body is not 100% efficient, coincidentally/conveniently it's in the range where you can just say 1 joule is about 1 cal

100 watts for an hour would be... 360 kcal or about 2.3 stellas

pottssteve

Thanks for the advice, guys, and especially to sun god for the link to the power curves - very interesting.

All other things being equal (which of course they are not), I estimate I do an hour at 150 watts average. This is based on riding for half the time in 50x14 and the rest in 50x17 on a standard road bike wheel with 170mm cranks at approx 75rpm. This is an average of 30kph, making 150 watts on an Elite Fluid Elastogel trainer. Based on sungod's info above, one hour at 150 watts is 540 calories, or 3.5 beers. This is good, as although I only had 2 beers last night I also had a bag of crisps, so should just about have broken even!