adrenalin/heart rate/calories

ryan scott wrote:
> if i have a fright, and my heart rate triples from adrenalin, am i burning
> more calories than normal.............??

Probably, but not solely because your heart rate is racing.

Your heart rate (HR) is an indication of degree of exertion while you
are performing a particular activity. The more intensely you perform
that activity, the higher the HR. But HR does not translate directly
into calories burned. The same HR while performing two different
activities might result in burning different amounts of calories. And
two different people performing the same activity at the same HR might
burn different amounts of calories.

That is why I deprecate the reliance on calorie indicators on exercise
machines and especially on HRMs (HR monitors) like Polar. Those
indicators rely on statistical averages. The accuracy of their results
depends on how close you are to the average. The Polar HRM is likely
to be least accurate because it is not activity specific. On the other
hand, the exercise machines are not gender specific. And there a whole
lot of other variables that such calorie indicators fail to take into
account, even statistically.

On the other hand, like age-based MHR (max HR) formulas like "220 -
age", knowing the average is better than no information at all. It is
a starting point.