One MET is the oxygen cost of sitting still, and every activity carries a researched multiple of it. Multiply the MET by your weight and minutes to get a solid calorie burn estimate for nearly anything you do.
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Scientific references
The unit exercise science runs on
Exercise scientists needed a common currency for effort and found it in resting metabolism. One MET equals the oxygen you burn sitting quietly, about 3.5 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which works out near one kilocalorie per kilogram per hour. Brisk walking costs roughly 3.5 METs, jogging around 7, and competitive cycling past 12. The Compendium of Physical Activities catalogs researched MET values for more than eight hundred activities, from gardening to judo, and the select list above draws from it directly.
The calorie formula
Multiply MET by 3.5 by body weight in kilograms, divide by 200, then multiply by minutes. The arithmetic reduces to this. A 75 kilogram person walking briskly for half an hour burns about 138 kilocalories, while the same person running at 8 METs burns around 315 in the same window. Body weight enters directly because moving a larger mass costs more energy at any pace, which is why heavier people see bigger numbers on identical workouts.
Why trackers disagree
Wrist devices estimate burn from heart rate and motion, then apply proprietary corrections that can swing thirty percent either way. MET math is transparent and reproducible, but it assumes average fitness and average efficiency. Very trained people often burn slightly less than the tables predict at a given pace because their movement economy improves. Treat any single estimate as a range, and let the trend across weeks guide eating decisions rather than one heroic session.
Moderate versus vigorous
Guidelines phrase activity targets in MET minutes. The 150 weekly minutes of moderate effort translates to roughly 500 MET minutes, and the running total across your week predicts health benefits better than any single workout. This calculator makes that bookkeeping easy to audit.