MET Hours / Week

Feature Requests
1

Is there interest in providing automatic calculation of MET Hours and providing the option for a customisable chart (configurable in desired durations, i.e. MET hours per week)?

Peter Attia talks about MET hours a lot. I’m super curious in tracking this. He mentions having created a spreadsheet for his various activities and intensities based on studies. He doesn’t list those studies in the show notes for #218 - AMA #38: Can you exercise too much? - Peter Attia. I’ve found this website, MET Minutes Calculator. It breaks intensity into the three domains—basically what we know as moderate, heavy, severe.

6 Likes
2

In regards to ‘non-athletic performance’ exercise, I have clients who would benefit from graphing easily understood METs to their Wellness data.

If I do it for them I want to also do it for me in order to provide possible depth & meaning.

Thus, I’d be very interested in having this functionality in Intervals.icu. :+1:

2 Likes
3

Why not use the already available and widespread Training Stress Score model ,TSS, and have everything ready in intervals.icu by looking at TSS/week. A rough estimate is 1METhour (=60 METminutes) equals 8 TSS.

4

Can you point me to documentation/research regarding the equivalencies of MET hours to TSS?

MET hours is a much easier concept to understand than TSS for the general public, especially when considering or discussion the multitude of papers on METs and health improvement.

5

If I am correct:
A MET is a measure of rate of energy expenditure, 1 MET = 3.5 ml/kg/min of VO2, which is equivalent to resting VO2 for the average human. So exercising for 30 minutes at 2 MET (7 ml/kg/min of VO2) or exercising for 6 minutes at 10 MET (35 ml/kg/min of VO2) are both equivalent to 60 MET minutes or 1 MET hour.

So 1 MET/hour is equivalent to consuming 210 ml of O2 per kg of body weight. Oxygen here can be considered a surrogate of energy, calories consumed.

Therefore, what we are really calculating here is total energy expenditure (relative to body weight) for the activity. This is what most watches nowadays already do, estimating your energy expenditure from different activities (much more acurate if you have a power meter or speed and distance, for example, than if relying only on HR or accelerometer data, but always an estimation).

So, at this point, why not just talk about kcal consumption, or kcal/kg if you want to compare people? I think this is a much easier concept than MET hours.

I (as an exercise physiologist) always found METs a weird unit (what is the need to normalize energy expenditure to resting levels?) and I find MET-hours a specially weird measure. You are taking a unit relative to time as is METs and then multiplying it by time again. It would be like, in cycling, calling 1 hour at 100 W = 100 Watt-hours as a measure of work, instead of 360 kJ (which will average to about 360 kcal consumed).
Or like the Pirate-Ninja unit, for those that have read The Martian.

We do that with electricity, we use kilowatt-hour as a unit. According to the internet, because everyone measures power in Watts and time in hours, so it’s relatable to people and more intuitive (sure, I’ll believe that). However, I think there is noting intuitive about METs, especially if we compare them to Calories.

And, in the end, we already have the calorie option for the charts in intervals.icu

2 Likes
6

METs are the easiest metric to understand. 1 MET is rest. 2 METs are twice the energy expenditure for that person. There’s zero need to think about calories, just exercise. Simply compare the number of MET hours each week. With guidance the person can ‘earn’ those MET hours in the proper way for their health and fitness (instead of chasing a number via higher intensity).

7

I guess I see the point, maybe it is actually easier to understand that for the general population. Something like “this week I exercised the equivalent to 24 h of resting” or something like that, and then they can see the progress.
Although I still think that calories are basically the same (literally energy expenditure), it may be good to nudge people away from thinking about calories, so they don’t try to trade exercise for food.
Especially in the case of general population doing plenty of different activities.

It would probably be somewhat difficult to have the MET for all different types of activities (would you want to include, say, gardening or chopping wood?). I think the estimations are usually very rough and with huge standard deviations, but still, if people are only comparing with themselves, it may be a good way to check that they increase their level of physical activity.

What I think should be avoided for the people who train using more devices (HR/Distance/Power) is having the MET metric overriding any of the others. For example, if someone rides 1000 kJ on the bike, that should still be 1000 kCal, and then maybe convert these kCal back to MET, but not just give the “general” MET number that was found on some paper. Same for running and distance. (This is where my previous comment was going, I think).

Also, if this is done, I think it would be cool to add a shaded line around the line/points to show the possible error. Taking into account that the cycling computers and watches take “normative” values for running economy and cycling efficiency, it would be cool if a shaded area of +/- X% of MET hours or calories could be added. Maybe this would help people not go crazy if they see that their energy intake is below their energy expenditure but they are still gaining weight. Or maybe this is just me, and the uncertainty would be more confusing for most people.

8

Another reason I dislike thinking in terms of calories is that it can lead to reductionistic thinking that a calorie is a calorie, which is far from true. METs help keep the focus on movement, which is what we are trying to help people with. Nutrition is a whole other bag of carrots. :wink:

1 Like
9

(I don’t mean to argue, just to keep the discussion going because I think it is interesting to think about this)

In the same way that a Calorie is not a Calorie, not all METs are created equal. Especially taking into account that the MET is itself a measure of intensity, right? How do you give your patients/clients/athletes the tools to consider METs (or MET·h) differently? In the end, MET·h are like TSS (an arbitrary multiplication of intensity and duration) and, for a given duration, the way to increase MET·h is to increase intensity.

2 Likes
10

True, all METs are not created equally. But at least we’re not mixing concepts.

Calories are a huge rabbit hole in regards to food and psychology. METs have to do with amount, type and intensity of movement. By limiting discussion to METs then the client can maintain diet unchanged. (Yup, I’m aware that doesn’t actually happen but it’s a way to limit the discussion to digestible parts.) Discussion about diet and nutrition, and thus substrate type and utilisation, is a different ‘class’ so to speak. If, however, a client comes to me with food questions and not exercise then we’ll start at that end of the field and work our way towards exercise.

2 Likes
11

Cool, thanks I like that distinction that you make in psyschological terms, I see how that could keep things separate in the minds of clients.

Maybe it’s because I work mostly with people who have performance goals, rather than health/weight, and when I have worked with this population they didn’t usually have access to tech, so it was work done without intervals.icu or any similar platform, but taking into account that more and more this population will have access to their data and will be able to see it in intervals.icu or other apps, I think it may make sense to help the keep these things separate (and maybe I as a coach would like to see the translation to calories, but I could keep that in my own chart that they will not need to see).

On the implementation side of things: even then, taking into account that there is a direct translation between MET·h and kcal/kg, if they are inputting data from a watch I think that maybe the best calculation could be to simply convert kcal/kg to MET·h.

That would be very simple to implement at the beginning, and maybe in the future someone can go through the literature checking what is the best MET value they can find for each different type of activity.

2 Likes
12

I read somewhere that a persons MET is their weight in kg, so if you weigh 77.5 kg then 1 MET/hour = 77.5 kcal so if true, relatively straightforward to calculate for each individual

See below from Alan Couzens

Alan Couzens
](https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens)

A 40-60% reduction in risk of death at 60 MET-hours/wk! This is not a small amount of exercise! Take a super-fit 70 year-old with a VO2max of 40ml/kg/min (this is super-fit ~95th+ percentile) Doing their aerobic training at 50-60% VO2max, this amounts to ~10 hours of training every week! i.e. ~90 minutes EVERY day! At lower fitness levels, it amounts to even more

13

Hello @Howie

I am asking for this feature too since 2020 :slight_smile:

To give you a guesstimate of your MET-min per week :
Take the total kcal of the week
Divide this by your weight in kg
Divide by the number of hours of exercising
i.e. last wk : 8250/65/13,5 = 9,4
9,4 is your average intensity of training in MET, it’s a rough approximation
Then take your training time and multiply by this figure
9,413,560=7600 MET-min

You can translate my blog post from French to your language to see various maths/phys computations around this topic

cheers

1 Like
14

Hello,

It would be cool to have the metabolic equivalents of our training time in the weekly summary. As METs-min or METs-hour. I only know Smashrun.com which does this and I find the concept cool and maybe useful for more casual athletes training with a health perpective.

Thank you

2 Likes
15

Hello @David this is a new call for this feature :slight_smile: I am digging the medical literature on the consequences of a lot of endurance sports on the heart and a lot of data to quantify activity is in MET-min / wk

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2722746

I think it’s a cool data to have and follow over time.

Thank a lot

UPDA[quote=“nfkb, post:15, topic:19652, full:true”]
Hello @David this is a new call for this feature :slight_smile: I am digging the medical literature on the consequences of a lot of endurance sports on the heart and a lot of data to quantify activity is in MET-min / wk

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2722746

I think it’s a cool data to have and follow over time.

Thank a lot
[/quote]

We have to do a custom datafield

Then your reanalyze the activity and you get the data you want.

Then reanalyzing 5 years of datas and sending the CSV to ChatGPT I got my data :slight_smile:

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16

This other thread covers some how you might add a custom data field like this: Allow users to choose alternatives to TSS - #10 by R2Tom

17

If you are using a Garmin, there is a MET data field that you can use to give you MET-hr/week. Also many watchfaces display MET-hr/week.