Confused!! about exercise cals burned

ok here is the deal.

calorie count tells me i burn like 300 calories an hour painting houses on the exterior, which is my current summer job.

today i went on the exercise bike for 20 mins, and the machine said i burned around 120 cals, going at a pretty moderate-fast pace. which means i'd burn around 360 doing that for an hour.

that doesn't make sense! how can standing on a ladder painting something burn only a tad less than biking and sweating with my heart rate going . maybe one of the numbers is wrong... sigh

any advice?

Jut being completely sedentary and doing nothing your body will burn 50-75 calories an hour. When you are painting an exterior of a house you are definitely not sedentary. You are not sitting down, you're up and moving, you're going up and down the ladder, your moving your arm back and forth, etc. Doing that for a solid hour should definitely burn at least 300 calories. Also, maybe because you have done a lot of painting your body may be more used to it, where as on the exercise bike, you may be using leg muscles you don't use on a regular basis. Just my .02

Definitely get a heart rate monitor and  see how many calories you're burning! :) I use the Polar F6 heart rate monitor.

yeah, it's a possibility that my bike is just messed up. it's really really old.

do heart rate monitors tell you how many cals you burn? or just your heart rate

Calories burned is a feature on some heart rate monitors like the polar F6 that may not be available on others, like the Polar F4.

Check it out. They usually sell for around $100. Well worth the investment.

ha, i know this post is old, but i decided to ressurect it.

just to be clear.. this device tells you how many calories you are burning no matter what activity you are doing? i could play piano and it could tell me, i could jog and it could tell me, i could eat a steak and it could tell me etc?

if i actually am going to spend the hefty 100 bucks i want to make sure it's worth it, and knowing how many calories i burn in certain activities would make the whole weight loss and calorie math thing a lot easier!

ps. and how does the calorie tracker thing even work? can it measure your body size, weight, heart rate and what activity you're doing? pretty advanced.

I don't have an F6 but I do have an F11 - it has a "fitenss test" that you take first off - this tells what your Vo2 rate is you also plug in your Date of birth height weight sex then it will give you target exercises to work on you can select from 3-6 a week.  Wearing one all day really isn't what they are intended for but I guess you could just remember not to "add these calories" into your base rate since the HRM if worn all day is going to give you a calorie burn- I think it also gives you a much higher rate than waht would normally occur day to day. 

I guess you could wear it while you are on the job and see what it tells you but just remember your body is 'adjusted" to your job if you've been doing this for any length of time and the body expects to burn that many cals and whatever you feed it the body will store in reserve enough to function day to day on the job.

The thing I like about the F11 and the VO2 test is that my calorie burn can vary week to week doing the same exercise routine becaseu the VO2 test stress and other things in your body that can effect calorie burn.  Also the more fit you become the less calories you will burn just like someone who is younger and thinner is going to burn less. 

I've seen posts in this forum about people wearing HRM for a 24 hour period and it says they burned 2- 3 times more cals than the site calculates - so IMHO you'd be better off choosing the correct activity level in your profile and then calculate your calorie needs on that.

thanks, that sorta helped... hehe.

but i'm not worried about calculating how many calories i burn on the job. i've decided to forget that concept entirely and base my excersize soley off "real" excersize - ie. biking, jogging, weight training etc. (if i do have a particulary strenuous day at work i'll of course take that into consideration)

however, like you were saying when you were talking about becoming more fit and burning less when exercizing etc., that's precisely what i'm wondering about.

i'm not talking about wearing it all day, but i'm wondering if the gadget can accurately calculate how much you burn in any excersise activity. say a 20 minute jog - can it access your speed (even if it fluctuates),  heart rate, and anything that will reflect how much you burn, and then the total number of cals burned? can it also "understand" the decrease in cals burned as you become "better" or "more used" to a certain activity?

can it also calculate cals burned with weight training?

(sorry for the relentless questions, i'm just trying to understand this product, and see if it does what i need!)