MET Values Chart for 44 Activities

These values come from the Compendium of Physical Activities, the reference list compiled from published measurements of oxygen consumption during specific tasks. Activities are grouped as light (under 3 METs), moderate (3 to 5.9) and vigorous (6 and above) — the same bands physical activity guidelines use when they ask for 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous activity a week.

Two comparisons in that list are worth pausing on. Sitting at a desk is 1.5 METs, so a desk job is genuinely close to resting. And general weight training is 3.5 METs — lower than brisk walking at 4.3 — because most of a lifting session is spent standing between sets. A hard session feels far more taxing than a walk, but the measured average oxygen cost across the hour is not.

The arithmetic is one line: calories per hour equals MET multiplied by body weight in kilograms. For part of an hour, multiply by the fraction. So 30 minutes at 8 METs for an 80 kg person is 8 × 80 × 0.5 = 320 calories.

Notice what the formula does not contain: age, sex, height, fitness level, and body composition are all absent. Only weight and duration matter. That is a deliberate simplification, and the next section is about what it costs you.

One MET is defined as 3.5 millilitres of oxygen per kilogram per minute, which works out to roughly 1 calorie per kilogram per hour. That equivalence was calibrated on a reference adult, and resting metabolism per kilogram is not constant across bodies: it falls as body mass rises, because fat mass is far less metabolically active than lean tissue, and it falls with age.

The table below makes the size of that error concrete. It estimates each body's actual resting rate per kilogram per hour from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, and compares it with the 1.0 the MET convention assumes.

For a body close to the reference the convention holds well — it overstates by about 4 percent. For a heavier, older body it overstates by roughly 47 percent. This is the opposite of what most people assume: because the formula multiplies by body weight, larger people are told they burn much more, and the figure they are given is also the least accurate.

There is a second, separate overstatement built into every MET figure. MET values are gross energy expenditure — they include the calories you would have burned anyway. For a 80 kg person doing 45 minutes at 8 METs, the standard result is 480 calories, but about 60 of those would have been spent resting on the sofa. The genuine extra cost of the session is closer to 420 calories. If you are adding exercise on top of a maintenance estimate that already accounts for your resting rate, using the gross number double-counts.

• Treat the result as a band, not a number. Measured energy cost for the same nominal activity varies by roughly 20 to 30 percent between individuals, on top of the drift described above. A calculated 400 calories means somewhere around 300 to 500.
• Subtract resting if you are adding to a TDEE. Use MET minus one for the extra cost of a session, rather than the full MET value, whenever the baseline already includes your resting metabolism.
• Do not eat back the full estimate. This is the practical failure mode. Exercise calories are overstated and food calories are typically underestimated, so treating the two as interchangeable is how a deliberate deficit quietly disappears.
• Use MET values for comparison, not accounting. They are reliable for ranking activities against each other — a 10 MET activity really does cost roughly twice a 5 MET one — and much weaker as an absolute measure for one person.

The calorie burn calculator applies these 44 MET values to your weight and session length, and the calories burned chart gives the finished totals for the most common activities across body weights.