METs question

I have kind of a dumb question…
When calculating METs for an activity where you start and stop with rest periods (like a resistance training session or HIIT session), do you only count the times you’re actually exercising toward the total duration, or is the duration the entire session, rest periods and all?

What are you using the MET calculation for? This would influence my answer of what to do, though I see no reason to calculate MET-minutes for resistance training at all.

Oh, sorry for not clarifying. It would be for calculating met minutes. Why wouldn’t you calculate net minutes for resistance training?

There are no met-minute recommendations for RT. Rather, the 500-1000 MET-minute recommendation is for conditioning activity, where MET-minutes is a sort of volume load or “tonnage” of conditioning. Unfortunately, the values for METs aren’t really representative for energy used for most individuals. It’s more of tool used in research and, as you’ve seen, guidelines.

For personal use, I would be tracking conditioning exercise you rate as harder than RPE 4 or so in minutes and aim for at least 150 minutes per week of that.

Oh, I see. I’ve heard you can get a more personal idea of your energy expenditure by measuring your VO2 max, and there’s a lab near me where I could have it measured. Do you think it’s worth it?

Thanks for the RPE guidance. I’m hoping to bump up my weekly met minutes to around 4k using the advice you and Austin gave on the conditioning podcast, using the 80/20 rule, and having much of that 80% be in zone 2 (if I understand what you guys are saying, correctly).

Yep, you’re correct regarding the distribution of conditioning intensity.

Energy expenditure during activity varies so much that a single VO2max measure isn’t going to be particularly useful for managing conditioning or diet via energy expenditure predictions.

That makes sense, especially long term as someone gets better at conditioning. I guess that’s why you and Austen recommend using RPE for conditioning

In the impending General Strength and Conditioning II template for example, we have people test their cardiorespiratory fitness on week 1 and then again on week 5 to update their target heart rate zones. Similar to other metrics of performance, cardiorespiratory fitness is dynamic and using a single value to predict another dynamic variable is prone to error.

Oh that is awesome, I can’t wait to download that template when it comes out. Thanks so much for your help :slight_smile: Happy Hanukkah!