Aside from the impending “Machine Apocalypse” cardio machines are notoriously untrustworthy, and people love to fall for their trickery because it makes them feel good about themselves. What I’m getting at here is not to believe the calorie numbers the machine spits out at you. Yeah, you burned calories for the hour you were on the treadmill, but it wasn’t eight hundred like the machine says.

The one truth about cardio machines is that you can’t trust it to count calories for you! The machine you’re using to do your workout doesn’t know enough about your body to be able to give you an accurate reading. Even if you go as far as to enter in your age and weight, which most people don’t, it still fails to give you a good reading. The numbers the machine gives you are based off a mathematical calculation of how fast and how far you have gone. What the machine fails to do is take your body composition into account.

Your body composition is basically your lean mass (bones, muscles, fluids) versus your body fat. Your lean mass burns calories because it consumes energy, where as fat does not. Let’s take two people of equal height and weight and have them run the same distance. The difference is, one is at twenty percent body fat, while the other is at eight percent. At the end of the run, the person with eight percent body fat will have burned more calories than the person with twenty percent because they have more lean mass. If those same two people had ran on a treadmill, it would have given them the same incorrect number of calories burned!

The bottom line here is if you are trying to lose weight don’t believe what the machine is telling you. You should also never use exercise to substitute a bad diet. If your goal is to burn calorie, then you need to eat right and get out there and move around. You don’t need to be wasting hours on a machine which will eventually control the human race!

-Scott