Calories Burned Calculator: What an Hour of Anything Costs
Pick an activity, put in your weight and how long you did it, and see what it actually cost you in calories. The calculator also shows how much of that you would have burned sitting still, which is the part fitness trackers quietly leave in. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere.
An hour of brisk walking burns
—
calories
How we got your number
MET values come from the 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities (Ainsworth et al.), the reference table behind almost every calorie burn figure you will see. One MET is the energy you use sitting quietly.
The same activity for 15 to 90 minutes
| Time | Burned | Net of resting |
|---|
Gross is the figure a watch would show you. Net is what the session added on top of doing nothing.
What else costs the same minutes
| Activity | MET | Burned |
|---|
Same weight, same duration, different activity. The spread between the easiest and hardest row is usually three to four times.
Why this number is an estimate
Every MET value is an average taken from a group of people in a laboratory, doing the activity at a set pace. You are not that average. Fitness changes it: a trained runner uses less oxygen at 6 mph than a beginner does, so the fitter person burns fewer calories covering the same ground. Technique changes it, most obviously in swimming, where an efficient stroke can halve the cost of a length. So do terrain, wind, altitude, cold water, a heavy backpack, and how much you rest between efforts.
The 3.5 in the formula is a convention too. It stands for 3.5 millilitres of oxygen per kilogram per minute as the resting rate, and for many adults, particularly heavier and older ones, real resting uptake is lower than that. When it is, every MET number calculated from it runs a little high.
Treat the result as a reasonable middle estimate with about 20 to 30 per cent of slack around it in either direction. It is precise enough to compare activities and to plan a week of training. It is not precise enough to eat back.
A MET, short for metabolic equivalent of task, is the unit that makes this calculator possible. One MET is what your body uses sitting quietly and doing nothing, roughly one calorie per kilogram of body weight per hour. Everything else is measured against that. Brisk walking is 4.3 METs, so it costs a little over four times what sitting costs. Running at 6 mph is 9.8 METs, nearly ten times. The full table lives in the Compendium of Physical Activities, a reference list of hundreds of activities that researchers have measured in a lab, and it is the source behind the numbers on your treadmill, your watch and every calculator like this one.
Because the formula multiplies by your weight, a heavier person burns more for the same movement. That is not a quirk of the maths, it is physics: carrying 95 kg up a flight of stairs takes more energy than carrying 65 kg up the same flight. It also explains something people find discouraging, which is that the calories burned by a given walk fall as they lose weight. The same route costs less at the end of a diet than it did at the start.
Fitness trackers report a bigger number than this page does, for two reasons. The first is that they show the gross figure, which includes the calories you would have burned anyway during that hour. For a gentle activity like yoga or cleaning, that resting share can be a third or more of the total. The second is that estimating energy expenditure from a wrist is genuinely hard. Heart rate monitoring is good, the conversion from heart rate and arm movement to calories is not, and validation work keeps finding errors in the range of 20 to 30 per cent, usually upward.
Which leads to the mistake that undoes more diets than any other: eating back what you burned. The burn is overstated, food logs are understated, and the two errors point the same way. A run that the watch scores at 500 calories might have cost 320 net, and the recovery snack that felt earned puts all of it back. Train because it makes you fitter, stronger and hungrier for the right reasons. Let the deficit come from the plate.
More free calculators
Work out the rest of your numbers with the daily calorie calculator, the BMR calculator, the BMI calculator, the ideal weight calculator or the recipe nutrition calculator. The full list is on the calculators page.
Frequently asked questions
How many calories does walking burn?
At a normal 3 mph pace walking is a 3.5 MET activity, which works out at about 260 calories an hour for a 70 kg adult and about 330 for a 90 kg one. Push to a brisk 3.5 mph and those become roughly 315 and 405. Walking uphill is worth 6 METs, close to double flat walking. Walking is the most underrated row in the whole table, because it is the one activity most people can repeat every day without needing a recovery day afterwards.
How many calories does an hour at the gym burn?
It depends entirely on what you do with the hour. Moderate weight training is 3.5 METs, about 260 calories for a 70 kg adult, the same as a walk. Training hard with short rests is 6 METs, about 440. Circuit training and HIIT sit at 8 METs, about 590. The catch is that an hour at the gym is rarely an hour of work: take out the warm up, the rests between sets and the time on your phone, and a 60 minute session is often 35 to 40 minutes of actual effort.
Are fitness tracker calorie numbers accurate?
Heart rate they measure well. Calories they estimate, and it is the weakest number on the device. Errors of 20 to 30 per cent are normal, and they get worse for lifting, cycling and anything where your arms move differently from your legs. Trackers also report the gross figure, which includes the calories you would have burned sitting on the sofa for the same hour. The calculator above separates that resting share out, and for a quiet activity it can be a third of the total.
How many calories do I burn a day without exercise?
Most of your daily total, in fact. Resting metabolism alone is usually 1,300 to 1,800 calories a day for an adult, and ordinary movement, standing, cooking, carrying shopping, walking to the car, adds a few hundred on top. A typical desk based adult lands somewhere between 1,600 and 2,200 calories a day before a single workout. The daily calorie calculator works your own figure out from height, weight, age and sex.
How many calories should I burn to lose a pound?
The old rule of thumb is 3,500 calories per pound of fat, or about 7,700 per kilo. It is a rough guide rather than a law. It comes from a 1958 estimate of the energy stored in body fat and it assumes nothing else changes, when in practice a lighter body burns less, appetite rises, and people move a little less without noticing it. Real losses over several months come in under what the arithmetic predicts, so treat 3,500 as a starting assumption and let the scale correct you.
Does lifting weights burn fewer calories than cardio?
Hour for hour, usually yes. Moderate lifting is 3.5 METs against 9.8 for running at 6 mph, so running wins on the stopwatch by a wide margin. Lifting earns its place a different way: it protects muscle while you are in a deficit, which keeps your resting metabolism from falling as fast as your weight does. For most people the best pairing is lifting for what it keeps and walking for what it burns.
Should I eat back the calories I burned?
Usually not, and this is the most common reason a diet quietly stops working. The burn is an estimate that runs high, part of it is the resting energy you would have spent anyway, and food logs run low for almost everyone. Between the two errors a 400 calorie run turns into a 600 calorie snack. If the daily target you eat to already assumes you train, the workout is paid for and nothing needs adding back.
How this calculator works
Sources
- Ainsworth BE et al. (2011). Compendium of Physical Activities: a second update of codes and MET values. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- NHS — managing your weight. www.nhs.uk
This calculator is for general information and is not medical advice. It is not suitable if you are under 18, pregnant or breastfeeding, or being treated for an eating disorder or a condition that affects weight. Speak to your GP or a registered dietitian before acting on the numbers.