Calories burned calculator

Roughly what a session costs, scaled to your bodyweight and how long you were at it. Useful for comparison, less useful as calories to eat back.

Milo

Activity

Weight (kg)

Minutes

Your burn will appear here.

How this is worked out

Every activity has a MET value: a multiple of what you burn sitting still. Walking is about 3.5 METs, so it costs three and a half times your resting rate. Running at 10 km/h is about 10.

calories = MET × weight(kg) × hours

Bodyweight is in there because moving 100kg over an hour costs more than moving 60kg. That’s also why the same session burns less as you get lighter, which is one of the reasons weight loss slows.

Treat the number as an estimate with wide error bars. MET tables come from population averages and don’t know your fitness, your technique, the terrain or how hard you actually pushed. It’s also GROSS burn, meaning it includes what you’d have burned sitting on the sofa anyway.

The number is the easy part

Any calculator can hand you a figure. The hard bit is the next three months: eating roughly to it, noticing when it stops working, and changing it. Milo is a coach you text like a friend. You log what you ate in a sentence, and it learns your patterns, notices when your weight stalls, and adjusts the target from what you actually did rather than from a formula.

See how Milo works

Common questions

Should I eat these calories back?

Usually not, or at most half of them. If you picked an activity level when setting your calorie target, your training is already counted, and adding it again is the most common way a deficit quietly disappears.

Why is my watch's number so different?

Watches estimate from heart rate and motion, and they consistently read high, sometimes by 30% or more for strength work, where heart rate is a poor proxy for effort. Neither figure is truth. Pick one and watch the trend.

Does lifting really burn so little?

By the hour, yes: much of a session is spent resting between sets. But that comparison misses the point of lifting, which is keeping muscle on you while you diet. The calories it burns during the session are the least valuable thing about it.

Does building muscle raise my metabolism much?

Less than the internet suggests. A kilo of muscle burns roughly 13 calories a day at rest, not the 50 to 100 often claimed. Muscle is worth having for plenty of reasons; a dramatically faster metabolism isn’t really one of them.

Other calculators

One rep max calculator — Your estimated 1RM from a working set, plus a full rep-max table.
Heart rate zones — Your max heart rate and five training zones, from age or resting HR.
Running pace calculator — Pace, speed and what it projects over 5k, 10k and a marathon.
TDEE calculator — How many calories you burn in a day, and what to eat for your goal.
Calorie deficit calculator — How long a given deficit takes to reach your goal weight.

These are estimates from population averages, not measurements of you. Individual metabolism varies by roughly ±10% around any formula. Nothing here is medical advice — if you have a health condition, are pregnant, or are under 18, talk to a healthcare professional before changing how you eat or train.