Exercising like a fiend but not losing any weight? Your smartwatch may be giving you too much credit for that stationary bike workout. A new study shows your smart watch may be outsmarting you—by inflating your workout on stationary cycling by as much as 25%–meaning your watch says you burned 200 calories—when you really only used 150 calories.
In a PLOS One study, researchers compared calorie estimates from four popular watches with laboratory measurements during stationary cycling. Depending on the device, the median error was roughly 15% to 25%. An inflated calorie count might please a watch-wearing customer, but the research establishes inaccurate estimates—not a deliberate effort to boost them.
Before you toss away that expensive iWatch, the study was of 58 adults, in one short cycling session. Exercise. Raise your heartrate. But consider the ‘calories burned’ data to be an estimate—and a motivation to do more.
