MET Calculator

One MET is the energy you spend sitting still, and a brisk walk is 4.8 of them, so a 70 kg person walking briskly for 30 minutes burns 4.8 x 3.5 x 70 / 200 x 30, which is 176 kcal. That sum is the whole calculator. Pick any of the 46 activities, each quoted from the Compendium of Physical Activities with its code, enter your weight and minutes, and it prints the kcal with the arithmetic beside it.

MET calculator: the formula

A MET, a metabolic equivalent, is defined as 3.5 millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute, the resting oxygen use of an average adult. An activity's MET value is how many times resting it costs. Oxygen converts to food energy at close to 5 kcal per litre, and folding the unit changes together gives the working line:

kcal per minute = MET x 3.5 x body weight in kg / 200

Multiply by minutes for a session, or by 60 for the hourly rate. A useful shorthand falls out of it: one MET is about 1 kcal per kilogram per hour, so a 70 kg person at 6 MET burns roughly 420 kcal an hour, and the exact formula gives 441. Close enough to do in your head at the gym.

MET values table: calories per hour by activity

Every row is a Compendium entry with its code. Calories are the formula above at three body weights, gross, meaning the resting MET is included.

The remaining rows, all 46 with codes, sit in the full list below the calculator. Two things stand out in the table. Lifting scores low, 3.5 MET for a normal hypertrophy session, because the clock keeps running while you rest between sets and the MET is an average across the whole hour. And walking fast is expensive: 4.0 to 4.4 mph costs 5.5 MET, close to jogging, because walking gets awkward above 4 mph.

Intensity bands

Public-health guidance sorts activity by absolute MET, and the bands are worth knowing because they are what "moderate" and "vigorous" mean in the guidelines.

Guidelines are also written in MET-minutes. Multiply the MET by the minutes: 150 minutes a week of brisk walking is 150 x 4.8, or 720 MET-minutes, and a typical weekly target sits in the 500 to 1,000 range. It is a tidy way to add a walk, a lift and a swim into one number.

What a MET cannot tell you

The value in the table is an average measured in a group of people, and the 3.5 ml/kg/min it is multiplied by is an average from a small mid-century sample. When resting oxygen use is measured in larger and more varied groups, it comes out lower for many people, often 10 to 20 percent lower in heavier and older adults and in many women, which means the formula over-counts for them at every activity in the list. The honest reading of any MET number is a band of about plus or minus 20 percent.

Then the band widens with the person. Two runners at 10 minutes per mile can differ by 10 to 15 percent in oxygen cost through economy alone. Terrain, wind, heat, a pack, a hill, none of it is in the table, and the walking calorie calculator and the hiking calorie calculator work through how much those move it. The same is true of every other source you might compare against. A treadmill console runs an equation much like this one, a wrist tracker models burn from heart rate, and in independent lab tests wrist devices have missed energy expenditure by a quarter or more. Nobody is measuring; everybody is estimating.

MET is also absolute, not relative. Six MET is a hard effort for an untrained 60-year-old and a warm-up for a trained cyclist, and the table has no way to know which one you are. For training intensity use heart rate zones or power. Use MET for what it is good at, comparing the energy cost of different activities on one scale, and estimating a session's calories to within a band.

Finally, it is gross. Subtract 1 from the MET before you run the sum if you want the exercise cost on its own, which is the figure to use when eating a session back. The calories burned calculator shows both versions side by side.

The rest of the set

The activity-specific pages carry the tables and the caveats for their sport: the treadmill calorie calculator with the incline arithmetic, the stationary bike calorie calculator and the rowing calorie calculator, which both add the watts cross check. Distance-based sessions live at the running calories, cycling calories and swimming calories pages. To put a session against the day, the TDEE calculator gives the daily total, the BMR calculator the resting floor, the calorie deficit calculator the gap, and the macro calculator the split.

How Movement Rebels fits

A MET table knows the average person. Your watch knows you. When you connect Garmin Connect or Apple Health, the coach in Movement Rebels reads every activity as it syncs, with duration, distance, average heart rate, power and TSS on rides, pace and splits on runs, and Concept2 erg sessions come in with their watts. The coach uses that as training load when it plans the week and reads it back to you in the post-activity debrief, and it also sees your training intensity distribution, the share of time by zone, which is the relative-intensity picture a MET value cannot give.

The coach cannot see your food. Rebel Fuel is your own log and nothing from it reaches the coach, so it does not compare intake with expenditure or count calories for you. If you are in a deficit, write it in the notes for your coach, and it will read a rising resting heart rate or a falling HRV as a fuelling signal rather than lost fitness. For where a deficit should come from in the first place, read How to Create a Calorie Deficit.

MET values used here

Every value below is quoted from the Compendium of Physical Activities with its activity code, so you can look up the entry yourself. One MET is the oxygen cost of sitting quietly, about 3.5 ml of oxygen per kg per minute.

Walking and hiking

Treadmill walking

Running

Curved (non-motorised) treadmill running

Cycling

Stationary cycling

Rowing machine

Swimming

Strength and gym

Source: Compendium of Physical Activities (Ainsworth et al.), pacompendium.com. Codes are the Compendium's own.

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