Does calorie burn rate depend on type of sport?

P

Passero

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I started running back in November with the main goal of losing some weight. At that time I was 129kg and now I'm around 119 so I got some steady progress by running around 2 or 3 times a week.
I also made some changes to my eating habbits. I ate a lot of candy and drank around 2 liter of diet coke per day. I stopped both. I know the diet coke won't have much impact on weight but getting rid of the caffeine and swapping it for just water is beter for health anyway...

Now, end December I got a small injury on my knee and I couldn't run anymore. I didn't want to give up sport so instead of running, I now go 3 to 4 times per week on my indoor bike.

Since I stopped running and change to the bike, my weights is stagnating. While running I was losing around 700g to 1kg per week. The last 3 weeks my weight is the same while the only thing different is the bike vs running...

When I exercise, I use a heart rate monitor from Garmin. When I was running I lost around 700-800 calories per session according to my Garmin. This usually was a session of around 50 to 55min and my average heart rate was around 144.

When I first started on the bike, my heart rate was lower (average around 130) but I was still burning 500-600 calories per session.
Now that I'm in my 4th week on the bike, my muscles are trained better and I notice my heart rate goes up as I can train on a higher intensity. My last session I got an average of 138 for a session of an hour. This was suppose to burn 750 calories.

I read that the type of sport doesn't really matter for how many calories you burn. It's all about the heart rate.
With all this, I don't understand why my weight is stagnating. I find it strange that it started stagnating when I switched from running to bike.

I also use myfitnesspal to log everything I eat. He puts me on a target of 2100 calories/day. I'm average 4300 calories/week under my goal which is really good but still my weight remains the same... I'm still eating enough. Usually my eating calories are around 1800 or higher. The main calorie loss is due to training.

Is this normal that the body sometimes doesn't lose weight and shouldn't I worry? Or could it be that the bike isn't a good way for me to lose weight? I somehow want to make sense out of this but I can't find an explanation...
 
if you want to get really technical, it's not your heartbeat, it's your breathing. if you do the math (actually chemistry), fat is a molecular combination of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen. you breath in O2... that combines with carbon and hydrogen from burning sugar (how fat turns into sugar is another story) and you exhale CO2 and H2O (water vapor)... and there goes your fat.

first off... i believe your unit is oversimplifying your calorie use. 800 calories/ hour is a huge amount of calories to burn in an hour. i would only use those meters for comparison. if it says your running today burned 400 calories and tomorrow it says you burned 800, it is likely that the 800 cal workout was twice as hard.

biking is a bit deceptive, too. i gave up running in my early 40's because of all the wear and tear i had done to my knees playing soccer for over two decades. i switched to biking, but when i went for a ride, it wasn't for an hour, it was for 4-5 hours and i covered 60-80 miles. other days i would cut the time by climbing hills. an hour of hill climbing is almost as effective as 3-4 hours on flat ground. it is a lot easier to coast when biking, but if you think about it, when you run, you are ALWAYS working.

at this point i've even given up biking for the most part and when i learned how to breath properly, i swim now. frankly i now find swimming to be the best exercise for me. totally non-impact and even if i am sweating, who cares!
 
and just to mention it... the worst part of diet soda is not the sweetener, it's the salt. soda is a deceptive beverage. the sweetener is there to mask the salt and the salt is there to keep you thirsty. of course with sugar-soda, this is a lot more devastating.
 
ok thanks for the info. I already knew the calories burnt aren't accurate with these devices however I also read that it depends on your weight and considering I'm a big guy, I'm using more more calories during a workout.

But, going back to your statement saying that I should use the calories burnt as an estimation on how hard the exercise was... When I run, it gives me around 800/hour. When I'm on the bike at home it gives me around 700/hour so there isn't that much in it. Biking seems 15% less "effective".

What I want to try to find out is why I'm not losing any more weight since the last 3 weeks. The thing that changes is the bike vs running. But it's also weird because I bike more. I bike around 4 to 5 times/week for an hour each while when I was running I went 2 to 3 times/week.

I'm just trying to find an explanation why I don't see any weight loss anymore.

I know the more weight you lose, the harder it becomes to lose even more weight but I'm still 119kg which shouldn't be that hard... I try to keep below 2000 calories intake/day which I manage on almost every day.
 
a few months ago i started to get a lot smarter about how nutrition works. believe me that i've only scratched the surface, but i can see the Dunning-Kruger effect in action already. the more you learn, ,the more you realize you didn't even know about before.

most people tend to have a very simplistic view of nutrition...
"Calories are all the same and calories out needs to be larger than calories in to lose weight."

it doesn't take long before you realize the three basic macronutrients are not all the same. your body reacts to carbohydrate calories much differently than it reacts to fat calories. how much you eat every day does not matter as much as when and how long you eat every day. to get a bit more technical, if you maintain a high insulin to glucagon ratio, you will never burn fat... your body will react by lowering your metabolism (the classic, "eat less, move more" diet).

throw in half a dozen more variables and that is how your body works. i've recently reached a BMI of 25 and at this point i am down to losing less than a pound a week. i can take any week of weigh-ins and it will vary up to 5-6 lbs. yesterday i was on the Y rowing machine for 30 minutes and my trip there includes a 3 mile round trip walk. i ate moderately yesterday and this morning i weighed +2 lbs. i'm really not that worried about it.
 
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ok so I shouldn't be worried about it at all and just continue the way I was?
so it's a coincidence that my weight remains the same from around the moment I started riding on the bike?

If that's the case, I'm happy and I know I don't have to change anything.

I was just worried that cycling wasn't as good as running as I might have a weak knee and have to go on the bike more than I go running. Although I really love running I might have to understand my body isn't made for running...
 
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