How to Calculate METs: Formula and Activity Values

A MET, or metabolic equivalent of task, is a simple ratio: the energy you burn doing an activity divided by the energy you burn sitting perfectly still. One MET equals your resting metabolic rate, pegged at 3.5 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. Running at a brisk clip might cost you 10 METs, meaning you’re burning roughly ten times more energy than you would planted on the couch. Turning that ratio into actual calories, comparing activities side by side, and knowing when the standard formula breaks down are all worth understanding if you want to use METs for anything practical.

What One MET Actually Represents

The foundation of the MET system is a single number: 3.5 mL O₂/kg/min. That value was chosen decades ago as the average oxygen consumption of a person sitting quietly at rest, and it became the benchmark against which all physical activities are measured. When researchers assign an activity a MET value of 6, they mean that activity demands about six times the oxygen (and therefore roughly six times the energy) of resting quietly in a chair.¹

Because METs express intensity as a multiple rather than an absolute number, they let you compare wildly different activities on a single scale. Vacuuming the living room and swimming laps both land somewhere on the MET spectrum, and you can compare their energy costs without needing a laboratory. That portability is why METs became the default currency in exercise science, physical activity guidelines, and cardiac rehabilitation programs.

The Calorie-Burn Formula

If you know an activity’s MET value and your own body weight, you can estimate how many calories you burn per minute with one formula:

kcal per minute = METs × 3.5 × body weight in kg ÷ 200

That 3.5 is the resting oxygen consumption mentioned above, and the 200 converts milliliters of oxygen into kilocalories (since roughly 200 mL of O₂ corresponds to 1 kcal when the body is burning a mixed diet of fuels).¹ Multiply the result by the number of minutes you spend on the activity and you get total calories burned.

For example, if you weigh 75 kg and you jog at 7 METs for 30 minutes: 7 × 3.5 × 75 ÷ 200 = 9.19 kcal/min, or about 276 kcal for the half hour. The formula is an estimate, not a lab measurement, but it’s how most fitness trackers and exercise prescriptions arrive at a calorie number.

Where to Find MET Values for Specific Activities

You don’t have to guess MET values. Researchers have been cataloging them since the early 1990s in a resource called the Compendium of Physical Activities, originally published in 1993 and updated multiple times since then to improve consistency across studies.² The most recent version, released in 2024, contains over 1,100 specific activity codes organized under 22 major headings, and roughly 82% of those entries now have measured MET values rather than estimates.³

The compendium is publicly available online. You can look up anything from sweeping the floor to competitive rowing and find an assigned MET value. Some commonly referenced values give a sense of the scale:

Sitting tasks: roughly 1.3 to 1.5 METs for things like reading, typing, or watching TV
Standing still: about 1.6 METs
Slow walking (under 2 mph): around 2.0 to 2.2 METs
Brisk walking (3–4 mph): roughly 3.5 to 5.0 METs
Moderate cycling or swimming: 6 to 8 METs
Running (6–8 mph): 9.8 to 11.8 METs

Sitting tasks hover close to 1.5 METs, which is also the cutoff used to define sedentary behavior in research. A study measuring the energy cost of various seated and standing tasks found that inactive sitting activities averaged between 1.33 and 1.45 METs, while slow walking at just 0.2 mph already registered about 2.17 METs and climbed steadily with speed.⁴

MET-Minutes and MET-Hours Explained

Public health guidelines often express physical activity targets not in raw METs but in MET-minutes or MET-hours per week. The calculation is straightforward: multiply the MET value of an activity by the number of minutes (or hours) you spend doing it. If you walk briskly at 4 METs for 30 minutes, that’s 120 MET-minutes. Do that five days a week and you’re at 600 MET-minutes per week.

Current U.S. physical activity guidelines recommend at least 500 MET-minutes per week, with additional health benefits seen beyond 1,000 MET-minutes per week.⁵ In MET-hours, that translates to roughly 8.3 and 16.7 MET-hours per week, respectively. The reason guidelines use this unit is that it captures both intensity and duration at the same time: a high-intensity activity performed for a short time can produce the same MET-minutes as a lighter activity performed for longer.

This matters because large-scale studies consistently find a dose-response relationship between weekly MET-hours and mortality. A 2024 analysis of four large multinational cohorts found that meeting the recommended level of about 7.5 MET-hours per week was associated with a 14% lower risk of death compared to being inactive. Doubling that volume to 15 MET-hours was associated with a 22% lower risk, and the benefits continued to grow, albeit more slowly, up to roughly 30 MET-hours per week, where the curve flattened at around a 26% risk reduction.⁶ Even doing half the recommended amount, about 3.75 MET-hours per week, was linked to an 8% lower mortality risk in that study, which is good news for people just starting out.

An umbrella review focused on older adults reported larger reductions: roughly 19–30% for all-cause mortality and 25–34% for cardiovascular mortality at the standard recommended activity levels, with even greater benefits at higher volumes.⁷ A systematic review of 13 studies confirmed that this inverse dose-response pattern between physical activity and mortality holds up consistently across different populations and study designs.⁸

Why the Standard 3.5 Value Can Be Wrong

The entire MET system rests on the assumption that everyone’s resting metabolic rate equals 3.5 mL O₂/kg/min. That number was derived from a single measurement of one 40-year-old man in the 1970s and then adopted as a universal constant. Researchers have spent decades pointing out that this causes systematic errors for large portions of the population.

A study examining resting metabolic rates across a broad sample of adults found that using the standard 3.5 value overestimates the actual resting metabolic rate by about 10% for men and close to 15% for women, with errors climbing as high as 20–30% for certain demographic and body-composition groups.⁹ The practical effect is that when you plug a MET value into the calorie formula, you may get a number that overshoots your actual energy expenditure, sometimes substantially.

The error tends to grow with body mass. In a study of overweight to extremely obese individuals, measured resting oxygen consumption averaged about 2.47 mL O₂/kg/min in women and 2.62 mL O₂/kg/min in men, both far below the textbook 3.5. The researchers developed BMI-specific correction factors to compensate. After applying those corrections, an exercise capacity that initially looked like 4.4 METs in women was recalculated as 6.2 METs, and 4.7 METs in men rose to 6.1. In other words, the uncorrected formula was making heavier individuals appear less fit than they actually were.¹⁰

Adjustments for Older Adults

The 3.5 value also overstates resting metabolism in older people. One study of adults aged 60 and above found that their measured resting metabolic rate was about 24% lower than the standard 1-MET benchmark.¹¹ That has real consequences. If an older adult walks briskly and we classify that as “moderate” intensity based on the standard MET cutoffs, the walk may actually represent “vigorous” intensity relative to their true resting metabolism.

To address this, researchers published a separate Older Adult Compendium of Physical Activities. Rather than dividing oxygen cost by 3.5, the older adult version uses 2.7 mL O₂/kg/min as the 1-MET value, which better reflects the lower resting metabolism seen in adults aged 60 and older.¹² If you’re over 60 and using METs to plan exercise or estimate calorie burn, this adjusted value will give you a more accurate picture. The catch is that most consumer fitness apps and clinical exercise calculators still default to the universal 3.5, so the numbers they spit out may understate how hard your body is actually working.

Pregnancy, Diabetes, and Other Special Cases

Pregnancy alters resting metabolism enough to shift MET values downward. Women at 32 weeks of gestation showed 7–15% lower MET values for the same standardized activities compared to non-pregnant women, owing to a higher resting energy expenditure that raises the denominator in the MET calculation.¹³ This doesn’t mean pregnant women are doing less work; it means the standard MET value assigned to an activity understates how much of their capacity that activity demands.

People with type 2 diabetes also tend to have lower measured MET values during exercise. A study comparing obese elderly individuals with type 2 diabetes to young healthy participants found that the best single MET value representing both light and vigorous resistance exercise was about 3 METs for the patients and 5 METs for the younger group.¹⁴ The lower measured METs here are influenced by both age and the metabolic effects of the disease. For clinical purposes, this means that standardized MET values from the compendium may not accurately reflect the true energy cost or relative effort for people with chronic conditions.

METs in Clinical Exercise Testing

Beyond fitness tracking, METs have a well-established role in medicine. During a clinical exercise stress test, your peak MET capacity, the highest MET level you can sustain, is a strong predictor of your long-term health outcomes. Higher peak METs generally indicate better cardiovascular fitness and a lower risk of dying from heart disease or other causes.

Clinics typically estimate peak METs from the speed and incline of a treadmill protocol rather than measuring oxygen consumption directly. The standard conversion assumes that METs equal VO₂ divided by 3.5. A large analysis of cardiopulmonary exercise test data found that peak METs and directly measured peak VO₂ correlated strongly overall, but the correlation was weaker in women aged 65 and older, which fits the pattern of the standard 3.5 value being less accurate for older adults and women.¹⁵

One important clinical caveat: different treadmill protocols produce MET scores that aren’t directly comparable. The Bruce protocol (which ramps up both speed and incline aggressively), the Cornell protocol, and the Naughton protocol (gentler and designed for less fit patients) all yield valid prognostic information, but a peak of 10 METs on one protocol doesn’t mean the same thing as 10 METs on another. Each protocol is internally consistent for predicting mortality risk, but you can’t swap results between them.¹⁶

How Altitude and Environment Affect Things

MET values in the compendium were mostly measured at or near sea level. If you take the same activity to high altitude, the oxygen cost story changes. At around 4,300 meters (about 14,100 feet), VO₂ max in well-trained healthy individuals drops by roughly 30% compared to sea level. At extreme altitude around 5,260 meters, the decline can reach approximately 46%.¹⁷ Acclimatization over a few weeks recovers some of that lost capacity, but not all of it.

What this means practically: if an activity is listed at 8 METs and your peak capacity at sea level is 12 METs, that activity uses about two-thirds of your maximum. Move to 4,300 meters, where your effective VO₂ max has dropped by nearly a third, and that same 8-MET activity is now pushing you much closer to your ceiling. The MET value of the task doesn’t change, but the fraction of your capacity it demands goes way up. Keep this in mind if you’re hiking at altitude, skiing in the mountains, or exercising in extreme heat or cold, which also raise the body’s metabolic demands beyond what standard MET tables account for.

Putting It All Together in Practice

If you want to use METs productively, here is a practical workflow. Start by looking up the MET value of your activity in the 2024 Compendium (or a reputable fitness resource that draws from it). Plug that value into the calorie formula along with your weight in kilograms and the number of minutes you plan to exercise. Treat the result as a ballpark estimate rather than a precise measurement.

If you’re tracking weekly activity against health guidelines, multiply the MET value by the minutes spent to get MET-minutes per session, then add sessions together across the week. Aim for at least 500 MET-minutes per week as a minimum threshold, and know that more is better up to a point. Here’s what that looks like with common activities:

Brisk walking (4.0 METs): 125 minutes per week hits 500 MET-minutes
Cycling at moderate effort (6.0 METs): about 84 minutes per week
Jogging (7.0 METs): about 72 minutes per week
Swimming laps, moderate (8.0 METs): about 63 minutes per week

If you’re over 60, pregnant, significantly overweight, or managing a chronic condition, the standard formula will overestimate how many calories you burn and may underestimate how hard you’re actually working. You don’t necessarily need to calculate a personalized correction factor, but it helps to know that the real numbers probably lean in that direction. For older adults specifically, using 2.7 instead of 3.5 as your resting value gives a more honest picture of exercise intensity.

The Compendium’s Limits and Evolving Science

The Compendium of Physical Activities, for all its usefulness, was designed as a classification tool for researchers, not a personalized energy expenditure calculator. Its creators have said as much. The MET values it lists are averages drawn from lab studies of mostly young to middle-aged adults, and they represent steady-state energy costs under controlled conditions. Real-world exercise is messier: terrain varies, effort fluctuates, environmental conditions change, and individual physiology differs in ways the table can’t capture.

The compendium has evolved considerably since its 1993 debut. It has been updated three times, growing from a few hundred activities to over 1,100, with the share of measured (rather than estimated) values climbing from about 68% in 2011 to 82% in 2024.³ That remaining 18% or so of estimated entries tends to cover activities that are difficult to measure in a lab, like surfing or wrestling. The compendium’s development and updates have been fundamental to improving comparability across physical activity research worldwide.¹⁸

Resistance training is one area where standardized MET values are particularly shaky. Unlike running or cycling, where effort scales reasonably well with speed or power output, the energy cost of lifting weights depends on the specific exercises, the weight used, rest intervals between sets, and the lifter’s training status. A single MET value for “resistance exercise, moderate” papers over a lot of real-world variation, and the differences between populations can be dramatic. That’s part of why researchers continue to push for more nuanced approaches to quantifying physical activity intensity, including wearable sensors that track heart rate or accelerometry in real time rather than relying on a static table of averages.

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