Podcast hosts: Jason Tucker and Steven Klassen discuss healthy weight loss for geeks.
Posts tagged Fitness
Letter to My Trainer
Jun 7th
I’ve been working out with a personal trainer (I haven’t gotten permission to use her name, yet). We had a debate about whether the Body Bugg (BB) or a heart rate monitor (HRM) is a better judge of calorie burn.
If you’re not familiar with the BB, it’s a unit that you wear strapped to your upper left arm all day long. At the end of the day you plug it into your computer, upload your data, and the website will present a graph with your calories burned throughout the day. A HRM is more straightforward – you wear a strap around your chest just under your pecs and it transmits your heart rate to a wrist watch (or other device).
My Polar FT7 came in the mail today. I read the manual, configured it for my weight, height, age, and gender and it dutifully reported that my max heart rate was 188 beats per minute (BPM). You can find yours by subtracting your age from 220. I ran the center portion under water, attached the WearLink® unit, and headed to Zumba. The results are in a letter to my trainer; Jason Tucker; and of course; my Zumba instructor, Kelly Emerson of Vancouver Zumba.
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Hi [there],
Today I wore a Polar FT7 during an hour of Zumba and came up with the following: 619 cals burned, 59:53 duration, 146 average bpm, 161 max bpm, 10:36 spent in fat burn range, 49:17 spent in fitness range. I uploaded my Body Bugg data and selected the same ~1 hour period and it reports 784 calories burned.
The Body Bugg site says the skew is due to having multiple data points instead of a single data point “which is what other calorie estimation devices such as pedometers and heart rate monitors rely on.” So, is an HRM inferior technology for measuring calorie burn? Maybe, but it’s possible it’s marketing hype. For me, it’s all relative. Whether it’s the scale, Body Bugg, HRM, or Omron body fat tester – their efficacy isn’t in question because as long as you’re using the same device to measure each data point you can tell when it’s going up and down.
I’ll continue to wear the Body Bugg to collect the waking-hours data and the HRM for workouts where intensity is something I’m interested in maintaining. That would be anything other than kickboxing and Zumba since I don’t have much control over the routines. I always squat a little bit lower and squeeze the abs a little bit tighter because I know that’s what is going to get me the most bang for the buck, but I don’t need an HRM to tell me that.
I’m looking forward to hitting the elliptical and seeing how consistently I can keep my heart rate in the fat burn zone. From what I’m seeing from the Zumba data my cardio fitness time is already covered.
/sk
GeekFit Podcast #35 – (360) 450-5026
May 21st
Steve and Jason return with a very special GeekFit presented in both Audio and Video for your enjoyment.
[blipit id="2142627"]
- Steve weight: 370
- Jason weight: 235
- Jason talks about walking at work
- Steve talks about going to the gym and how they are selling their equipment to stay afloat
- Steve is thinking about leaving Ballys and my join 24 Hour Fitness
- Jason shows off his Unicycle and talks about how rough it is getting back into riding one
- Steve talked about his TRX Essentials and the video he recorded (shown in the video version of this podcast episode)
- Got an app, website or product you want us to discuss or review? Email / VM us: 360-450-5026
- Do you want to be on the show? Email / VM us: 360-450-5026
- Do you Twitter? We do, feel free to add us and ping us, our links are below.
Voicemail: (360) 450-5026
Twitter:
http://twitter.com/geekfit
http://twitter.com/jasontucker
http://twitter.com/mrxinu – Be sure to message steve when you add him.
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This Is Not a Diet
May 20th
My buddy Jacob has a health and fitness website called This Is Not a Diet where he is documenting the journey of some of his friends and family losing weight and living healthy. Their tagline is: “It’s a year long mission to break the habits that make us unhealthy and overweight”. Currently they have thirteen people involved in this project, they document their struggles and achievements in the form of words, video, audio and pictures. I plan to get him on the show to discuss what they are doing over there and how everyone is progressing.
GeekFit Podcast

