Jump Rope Calorie Calculator

Background.

Every skip lifts your whole body off the floor, and doing that a hundred or more times a minute is expensive. The 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities rates rope jumping at a moderate pace, 100 to 120 skips a minute, at 11.8 METs: close to twelve times the energy you use sitting still. That is why a few minutes with a rope leaves people more winded than they expect.

The Compendium splits rope jumping by skip rate, and the three paces on this page come straight from it. Under 100 skips a minute with a rhythm bounce is slow, at 8.3 METs. From 100 to 120 with a plain two-foot bounce is moderate, at 11.8. From 120 to 160 is fast, at 12.3. The step that matters is the first one: moving from slow to moderate raises the estimate by about 42%, while pushing on to fast adds only about 4% more.

The estimate multiplies the MET by your weight and your minutes of skipping, so a heavier person is credited with proportionally more for the same session, because more mass is lifted with every jump. The result is gross energy: it includes the resting calories you would have used anyway, which for a 70 kg adult come to roughly 1.2 kcal a minute.

The weak point is time. Few people skip continuously for half an hour; most sessions are rounds of a minute or two with breaks between them. The MET values describe skipping itself, so entering a whole 30-minute workout that was half rest will roughly double the true figure. Trips over the rope, technique and the weight of the rope itself are not part of the calculation.

What is jump rope calorie calculator?

A jump rope calorie estimate converts minutes of skipping into energy expenditure in kilocalories, the unit food labels call Calories. It uses a MET value, the ratio of an activity's energy cost to resting metabolism, chosen by skip rate from the 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities. The figure is a population average for a person of your weight at that pace, not a measurement of your own metabolism, and it counts resting energy along with the extra cost of the exercise.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Weight goes in as kilograms, ideally a recent morning reading; to convert from pounds, divide by 2.205, so 154 lb becomes about 70 kg.
2. 02Enter the minutes you were actually skipping. Add up the working rounds and leave out rests between them, time spent untangling the rope and any warm-up done without it.
3. 03Choose the pace by skip rate. Count skips for 15 seconds and multiply by four: under 100 a minute is slow, 100 to 120 is moderate, 120 to 160 is fast.
4. 04Read the calorie figure together with the MET shown beside it, which confirms the pace that was applied.

The formula.

Energy (kcal) = MET × 3.5 × weight in kg × skipping minutes ÷ 200. One MET is defined as an oxygen uptake of 3.5 millilitres per kilogram of body weight per minute, so MET × 3.5 × weight gives the oxygen used each minute in millilitres. Dividing by 200 converts that to kilocalories, since it is the same as dividing by 1,000 to get litres and multiplying by about 5 kcal released per litre of oxygen. The MET is fixed by the pace you select: 8.3, 11.8 or 12.3, from the Compendium's rope-jumping entries. Weight and minutes enter in direct proportion, so doubling either doubles the answer. Pace has an uneven effect: slow to moderate raises the result by 42%, moderate to fast by only 4%. Resting energy is not subtracted, which is why the figure is described as gross.

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.