Burpee Calorie Calculator

Background.

A burpee takes you from standing to the floor and back in a couple of seconds: drop into a squat, kick the feet back into a plank, pull them in again and jump. It is named after the American physiologist Royal H. Burpee, who used a simpler four-count version as a fitness test, and it has stayed popular because it needs no equipment, no space beyond a mat, and gets you out of breath quickly.

Most of the effort goes into lifting your own body off the floor, rep after rep, so body weight drives the energy cost. At the same vigorous effort, a 95 kg person doing 30 minutes is credited with 399 kcal and a 55 kg person with 231.

The estimate is built on metabolic equivalents. One MET is the energy cost of sitting quietly, taken as 3.5 millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute, and an activity rated at 8 METs costs eight times that. The page offers three levels, Moderate at 5.0, Vigorous at 8.0 and Very vigorous at 10.0, and multiplies the chosen one by your weight and time.

The time that counts is time spent moving. Hardly anyone does burpees nonstop for half an hour; real sessions alternate bursts with rest. Twenty rounds of 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off contain ten working minutes, not twenty, and entering the clock time doubles the answer. The figure is also gross: it includes the resting energy you would have used anyway, and it leaves out the extra oxygen your body keeps using for a while after hard intervals.

What is burpee calorie calculator?

A burpee calorie estimate is the energy, in kilocalories, that a person of a given weight can expect to spend doing burpees for a given number of minutes at a chosen intensity. It rests on the MET, the ratio of an activity's energy cost to resting metabolism, so 8 METs means eight times the energy of sitting still. The result is an average for people of that weight rather than a measurement of you, and it counts all the energy used during the session, resting metabolism included.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Enter your Body weight in kilograms; 165 lb is about 75 kg. If you train in a weighted vest, adding its weight gives a rough allowance for the extra load you lift on every rep.
2. 02Under Activity duration, enter working minutes only. For interval workouts multiply the work period by the number of rounds: 20 rounds of 30 seconds is 10 minutes.
3. 03Choose the Activity intensity by how the set felt. Moderate suits a steady pace, for example stepping back instead of jumping; Vigorous suits continuous full burpees that leave you breathing hard; Very vigorous is for flat-out sets where talking is impossible.
4. 04Read the kilocalorie figure, and check the MET shown beside it to confirm which level was applied.

The formula.

Calories = MET × 3.5 × weight (kg) ÷ 200 × minutes. Multiplying the MET by 3.5 gives oxygen use per kilogram each minute, and multiplying by your weight turns that into millilitres per minute for the whole body. Dividing by 200 does two jobs at once: it converts millilitres to litres (÷ 1,000) and applies the roughly 5 kcal of energy released per litre of oxygen consumed (× 5). The last step scales by time. Each factor is a straight multiple, so doubling weight or minutes doubles the answer, and stepping up from Vigorous to Very vigorous adds exactly a quarter. Intensity is the weakest link: the gap between 5.0 and 10.0 METs is a factor of two, far larger than any error in your weight. Nothing is subtracted for resting metabolism, and nothing is added for after-exercise oxygen use.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]Adult Compendium of Physical Activities. 2024 Adult Compendium. Activity-specific metabolic equivalent codes. Retrieved 2026-08-06.
2. [2]U.S. National Institutes of Health. Health information current 2026. Evidence-based health measurement context. Retrieved 2026-08-06.
3. [3]U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed record current 2026-08-06. Indexed derivation and validation literature. Retrieved 2026-08-06.