About the Calories Burned Calculator
Estimate how many calories you burn walking, running, lifting, or dancing. Uses standard MET (Metabolic Equivalent of Task) values with your body weight and workout duration for a realiztic count.
Your weight and workout details are processed in the browser and never uploaded. No fitness account, no data sale, no profile built from what you searched for.
Results are estimates for general information only and are not medical advice. Talk to a healthcare professional before making significant changes to your diet or exercise.
How to use it
- Choose your activity.
- Enter your body weight and how long you exercised.
- Read the estimated calories burned.
The MET method, and why it is only an estimate
Calories are estimated using METs — Metabolic Equivalent of Task. One MET is your resting rate; an activity rated 7 METs costs roughly seven times that. The arithmetic is METs × weight in kg × hours.
It ignores fitness level, efficiency, terrain, temperature and body composition, so treat the figure as a ballpark. Two people of the same weight doing the same run can differ by 15% or more.
A worked example
A 72 kg person exercising for 45 minutes:
- Running at 5 mph (7.0 METs): 378 kcal
- Brisk walking (4.3 METs): 232 kcal
Running burns about 63% more for the same 45 minutes — but it is also far harder to sustain daily. The activity you will actually repeat usually beats the one with the higher number.
Common mistakes
- Trusting cardio-machine displays, which commonly overestimate by 20% or more because they do not know your weight or fitness.
- Eating back every estimated calorie. If the estimate is 20% high, the deficit disappears.
- Ignoring that the figure includes the calories you would have burned anyway just by existing during that time.
Questions people ask
Why does my watch give a different number?
Wearables add heart-rate data and their own proprietary models. Neither figure is exact; both are estimates built on different assumptions.
Does building muscle raise my daily burn?
A little. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, but the everyday difference is smaller than fitness marketing suggests.
Is this suitable for planning weight loss?
As a rough input, yes. Pair it with the Calorie Calculator for daily needs, and treat all such numbers as estimates rather than measurements.