You pay too much attention to the numbers on the machine

You can’t help but feel victorious when the “calories burned” window on your elliptical dash hits triple digits. But there’s a catch. Those numbers may be skewed. Most cardio machines can only detect weight and age, and that’s only if you plug in your own information. But overall, they can’t detect who is using it in terms of body type, fitness level, height, or body fat percentage, which means the numbers on the machine during your elliptical workout may not be accurate to you. In fact, researchers from the University of California at San Francisco found that the elliptical overestimated calorie burn by 42 percent. “Don’t pay attention to the numbers on the machine. Pay attention to how hard you’re working because that’s correlated with calorie burn more than the machine,” says Singer