How to Calculate Your Workout's Calorie Burn
This is Your Quick Training Tip, a chance to learn how to work smarter in just a few moments so you can get right to your workout.
At its most basic level, the formula for fat loss is simple: Eat less, move more. To shed pounds, you have to burn more calories than you consume each day, which is why dialing in your diet is always step number one for slimming down (and why you can’t “out-exercise” a bad diet). But in addition to adjusting your eating habits, it only makes sense to start weighing your workout options based on their calorie-incinerating potential.
In some cases, the choice is easy. You don’t have to be a kinesiologist to know that a half-hour of HIIT will torch more calories than a 30-minute yoga class. But will you burn more calories doing HIIT or MMA training? Running or cycling? Swimming or rowing? To be clear, it’s nearly impossible to determine with 100 percent accuracy how many calories you’ll burn during a given activity—the exact number depends on your height, weight, gender, fitness level, body composition, and genetics among other factors—but you can get a rough idea with METs.
Short for “metabolic equivalents,” METs represent the energy cost of an activity, and they’re based on the rate of oxygen consumption required to perform it. One MET is the amount of oxygen consumed at rest (e.g., reading this article), and it equals 3.5 milliliters of oxygen consumed per kilogram of body weight per minute. In other words, one MET is your resting metabolic rate (RMR). All other activity builds on that, so an exercise that is, say, 11 METs (such as running at an 8:30 mile pace) requires the body to use 11 times more oxygen—and burns significantly more calories as a result.
Bottom line: Knowing the METs for a given activity can help you determine how well it aligns with your fitness goals, especially as they pertain to weight loss.
Your move:
To ballpark the calorie burn for a workout, you’ll first need its MET value, which can be found in the Compendium of Physical Activities. Next, plug that value into the following formula to figure out how many calories you’ll burn per minute: METs x 3.5 x bodyweight (in kg)/200 (or simply use an online calculator to do the math for you). If you weight 160 pounds (72.5 kg) and are gearing up for an intense, half-hour circuit training session (8 mets), you can expect to burn approximately 10 calories per minute, or 300 calories total. Booya.
Keep in mind that the number you calculate is only an estimate. As stated above, your actual calorie burn depends on a whole lot more than just your weight and a MET value. Every body is different, and everybody will burn a different number of calories for a given activity. But as long as you eat healthfully and exercise hard consistently, you’ll see noticeable results.
You Might Also Like
