Calories Burned Chart by Activity and Body Weight

Find your activity down the left edge and the weight closest to yours across the top. Every figure is the MET value of the activity multiplied by body weight in kilograms and by half an hour — the standard method, described in full on the MET values chart.

The weight column matters more than most people expect. The same 30 minutes of running at 10 km/h burns 250 calories at 50 kg and 550 at 110 kg — a difference of 300 calories for identical work, because you are moving 60 kg more mass. It also means the figures shrink as you lose weight: the same workout that burned 550 calories at the start of a diet burns measurably fewer by the end.

Calorie burn is linear in time under this method, so a 90-minute session is exactly six times a 15-minute one. The table below spells that out at 70 kg for a shortened list of activities.

This is the same arithmetic reversed, and it is the version that tends to be useful. Rather than asking what a session is worth, it asks what a target costs — 500 calories at 70 kg, sorted from the slowest way to get there to the fastest.

The gap between the top and bottom of that table is the honest summary of exercise as a weight-loss tool. Brisk walking needs about 100 minutes to reach 500 calories; running at 10 km/h needs 43. Both are real, and both are a large share of a day compared with the few minutes it takes to eat 500 calories.

One pattern in the underlying MET values is worth extracting, since it settles a common argument. Divide each activity's hourly cost by the ground it covers and running comes out at 67 to 70 calories per kilometre at 70 kg — near-constant whether you run at 8, 10, 12, or 14 km/h. Brisk walking is about 46 calories per kilometre. So running is not more efficient than walking per kilometre; it costs around 50 percent more. Its real advantage is time: at 10 km/h it covers that kilometre in about two thirds of the time a brisk walk takes, and at 14 km/h in under half.

That is not an argument against training — the health benefits of exercise are largely independent of whether you lose weight. It is an argument against treating exercise as the primary lever for a calorie deficit. A 500 calorie daily deficit is far easier to hold from the intake side, and the calorie deficit calculator shows what that produces over time.

Three separate effects push actual fat loss below what these figures imply. None of them makes the chart useless, but together they explain why the scale rarely matches the arithmetic.

• These totals include your resting calories. MET values are gross expenditure. A 70 kg person burns about 35 calories in any 30 minutes just by existing, so the additional cost of a session is the chart figure minus that. For a light activity the correction is large in relative terms.
• People compensate without noticing. Studies of exercise interventions consistently find less weight loss than the energy expenditure predicts, largely because of increased intake and reduced spontaneous movement over the rest of the day. Trials measuring free-living expenditure have found roughly a quarter to a half of the added exercise energy offset this way.
• The afterburn is small. Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption is real but modest — typically a few percent of the session cost for ordinary training, not the several hundred calories sometimes claimed for high-intensity work.

The practical approach is to use these figures for planning and comparison rather than accounting, and to judge progress from weight and measurement trends over several weeks. The calorie burn calculator covers all 44 activities at your exact weight and session length, and the guide to why calorie estimates are estimates goes into the measurement evidence.