Free Calories Burned Calculator

What a MET actually is

A MET — metabolic equivalent of task — is a multiple of resting energy expenditure. One MET is defined as the oxygen cost of sitting quietly: 3.5 ml of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute, which works out to roughly 1 kcal per kg per hour. An activity rated at 8 MET costs eight times as much energy per minute as sitting still.

The values are not guesses. They come from the Compendium of Physical Activities, a research catalogue that has been compiling directly measured oxygen consumption for hundreds of activities since 1993, updated in 2000, 2011 and again in 2024. Every number in the table on this page is taken from it unmodified.

The formula

The two constants are doing real work. The 3.5 is the oxygen cost of one MET in ml/kg/min. The 200 converts millilitres of oxygen into kilocalories, because burning fuel with one litre of oxygen releases about 5 kcal — so 1,000 ml ÷ 5 kcal = 200. Two constants and a multiplication, which is why this method has outlasted every proprietary alternative.

Where the method breaks down

MET arithmetic is transparent, not accurate. Four things it cannot know:

• Your economy. MET values are averages from lab subjects. An experienced cyclist at 15 mph spends meaningfully less energy than a novice at 15 mph — better position, smoother pedalling, less wasted motion. Efficiency differences of 10–20% between trained and untrained people at the same output are normal.
• Terrain, wind and altitude.“Cycling, 14–15.9 mph” assumes flat ground and still air. A headwind or a 5% grade can double the cost at the same speed, and the table has no slot for it.
• EPOC. After hard exercise your metabolism stays elevated while you restore oxygen stores, clear lactate and repair tissue. This is real, and it is small — typically 6–15% of the session's cost, and only after genuinely vigorous work. The “afterburn effect” sold as a reason to choose HIIT is worth tens of calories, not hundreds.
• Resting overlap. These are gross figures. You would have burned about 1 MET during that hour anyway, so the extra burn attributable to the workout is lower — about 90% of the shown figure for hard running, but only 60% for gentle yoga.

A ±15–20% band around any figure here is realistic. That is still better than a wrist-worn tracker, whose published energy-expenditure errors run far wider — and considerably better than guessing.

What to do with the number

Not eat it back. The single most common misuse of a calories-burned figure is adding it on top of a calorie target that already accounts for training. If you set intake with the TDEE calculator and chose “moderate — exercise 3–5 days per week”, your sessions are already priced in; adding them again double-counts. Pick one method and stick to it.

The second misuse is treating exercise as the lever for fat loss. A hard 45-minute session for a 75 kg adult is 400–600 kcal, which one large muffin erases. Appetite also rises with training, so the net deficit is smaller than the arithmetic suggests. Exercise is close to irreplaceable for cardiovascular health, insulin sensitivity, mood, bone density and preserving muscle while dieting — it is simply a weak tool for creating an energy deficit. Set the deficit with food using the calorie calculator, and let training do the jobs it is actually good at.

Where this tool earns its keep is comparison. It tells you that 30 minutes of vigorous rowing is worth about three times 30 minutes of Hatha yoga, that walking briskly for an hour beats a lifting session on pure energy cost, and that going from an 11-minute mile to an 8-minute mile is roughly a 40% increase in cost per minute. Those ratios are the durable, useful part.

Intensity thresholds

These thresholds are what public-health guidance is built on: 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week, with one vigorous minute counting as two moderate ones. The MET column below is therefore also a compliance check — anything at 6.0 or above earns double credit.

The full MET table

Every activity in this calculator, with its MET value and the calorie cost per hour for a 70 kg adult. Scale linearly for your own weight: at 90 kg, multiply by 1.29; at 55 kg, by 0.79.

Values are from the Compendium of Physical Activities (2024 Adult Compendium, the current update of the 2011 edition). Where the Compendium lists several entries for one activity, the intensity-specific entry is used rather than the “general” catch-all, because the general values sit awkwardly between the real intensity bands.

For the resting end of the same scale, the BMR calculator gives you the 1 MET baseline in kcal/day for your own body — the number every value in this table is a multiple of.