No Faith in the Moral Standards of the Players as a Group

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I feel like maybe I am missing something, and it may be because I never took physics, but let me try again.

The machine can measure how many watts you produce. Wikipedia tells me a watt is a unit of power, a measure of energy transferred per unit time. So if the machine can measure watts and time, you can derive energy. Calories are a measure of energy. So the machine should be able to measure calories of work performed. It is true that bodies will differ in terms of how efficiently they can mobilize the body's resources to convert them to do work. It is also true that it takes more energy to move a bigger body, but if you can input weight and it can calculate watts, doesn't that address that issue?

First, no one puts their height, weight, age, and sex into those machines. If they did, yes, the read would be more accurate.

Second, I don't know how you can write the last two sentences next to each other. The better athlete you become, the fewer calories you will burn (workouts being equal). I have been doing a lot of HIIT workouts. If you and I did the same exact workout, I would burn far fewer calories than you. If I did the same distance run as Coltrane, he would burn far fewer calories than I.

If it were a simple matter of if you go X fast for X amount of time you will burn X amount of calories if you weigh X amount and are X tall etc., athletes would not plateau. As the body gets more efficient it needs fewer calories to do the same amount of work. This is why athletes will throw sprints in on a distance run to force their bodies to work harder (even while reducing the total number of miles run).

TM