How Many Calories Do Push-Ups Burn? MET Table by Weight

How Calorie Estimates Work

Exercise calories are calculated from MET values, metabolic equivalents, published in the Compendium of Physical Activities (Ainsworth et al., 2011). One MET equals your resting metabolic rate, about 3.5 ml of oxygen per kg of body weight per minute. The 2011 Compendium assigns calisthenics such as push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and jumping jacks a value of 3.8 MET for light-to-moderate effort and 8.0 MET for vigorous effort.

The standard ACSM equation converts MET into calories: kcal/min = MET x 3.5 x body weight (kg) / 200. Your burn scales directly with your body weight, a heavier person burns more because they move more mass, and with intensity, which is why the range between 3.8 and 8.0 MET matters so much.

Worked example for a 70 kg person: 3.8 MET x 3.5 x 70 / 200 = 4.655 kcal/min at moderate effort, and 8.0 x 3.5 x 70 / 200 = 9.8 kcal/min at vigorous effort. Double the intensity category and you roughly double the burn per minute, because the MET value does the same. Every table and number on this page comes from that equation.

Calories Burned by Body Weight

The table below uses the Compendium MET values (3.8 moderate, 8.0 vigorous) and the ACSM equation for a 10-minute session. Moderate effort means steady, controlled push-ups at a sustainable pace; vigorous effort means fast, high-intensity reps close to your maximum.

Two reading notes. First, the difference between a 50 kg and a 100 kg person at vigorous effort is exactly a factor of two, because the equation scales linearly with body weight. Second, a 10-minute session, even going all-out, costs a 70 kg person under 100 kcal, which is less than a slice of bread with butter. That single comparison is the honest summary of push-up calorie math.

If you weigh somewhere between the rows, interpolate: a 75 kg person sits about halfway between the 70 kg and 80 kg rows at every intensity. You can also run the equation directly for your exact weight, and the effort category matters more than a kilogram here or there. The practical point is that no realistic body weight or intensity turns push-ups into a high-yield calorie burner.

Calories Per Push-Up

To translate minutes into reps, assume roughly 15 push-ups per minute at moderate effort and up to 30 per minute at vigorous effort. For a 70 kg person, that works out to about 0.31 kcal per push-up at a moderate pace and 0.33 kcal per push-up going fast: call it ~0.3 kcal per rep for a typical adult.

Burning 100 kcal with push-ups means roughly 250-450 reps depending on your body weight, and that is at moderate effort with essentially no rest between sets. A realistic session of 5 sets of 20 burns somewhere around 30-35 kcal. The arithmetic is not an argument against push-ups; it is an argument against expecting them to drive weight loss on their own.

The Per-Minute Reality of a Push-Up Session

Worked out over a real workout, the numbers stay small. Consider a 70 kg person doing 5 sets of 15 push-ups at moderate effort, with 90 seconds of rest between sets. The working time is about 5 minutes at 4.7 kcal/min, roughly 24 kcal of actual exercise, spread across a session that takes 11-12 minutes with rest. Even a determined circuit, 10 sets of 20 at a vigorous pace with 30-second rests, spends maybe 6-7 minutes in actual motion and burns 60-70 kcal total.

For context, 60-70 kcal is about what you get from a single medium banana, and it takes roughly 200 calories just to burn off a small doughnut. When you see claims online that push-up challenges burn hundreds of calories, the arithmetic almost always assumes continuous vigorous movement for the whole session, which real push-up training is not.

That said, a push-up circuit can still be useful for conditioning. The point is to be honest about what the numbers mean: a 30-70 kcal session is a rounding error in a daily budget, but a 5-10 minute push-up circuit that leaves your chest and shoulders fried is a genuinely efficient strength and muscle stimulus. Energy expenditure is the wrong lens for judging it.

Why Push-Ups Are a Poor Weight-Loss Tool

Three structural reasons explain why push-ups will never be an efficient fat-loss exercise, and none of them are fixable with more effort.

• Short work bouts. A set of 15 push-ups lasts 20-30 seconds. Even elite performers can only keep a push-up going for a few minutes before the chest and triceps give out. Aerobic exercise can run for 30-60 minutes continuously, and the calorie burn compounds with time in a way strength sets cannot.
• Limited muscle mass at work. The chest, triceps, and front delts are small relative to the legs. Moving your whole body with the legs, walking, running, cycling, burns more per minute than pressing with the arms, no matter how hard you push.
• Low volume ceiling. To get a meaningful calorie number you need hundreds of reps, and hundreds of reps of pressing is exactly the recipe for shoulder and elbow overuse that the daily push-up challenge warns about.

None of this makes push-ups bad. It makes them mislabeled. In the calorie conversation, push-ups belong on the strength side of the ledger, where they are excellent, not on the calorie side, where they are trivial. The most efficient path to fat loss remains a sustained calorie deficit built from diet, aerobic exercise, and a little strength work to protect muscle, and push-ups are the strength work, not the calorie burner.

What Makes Push-Ups Burn More

If you want to raise the energy cost of a push-up session, these five levers actually work.

• Add weight. A weighted vest or backpack raises the work per rep and pushes the exercise toward the vigorous end of the scale (Ebben et al., 2011). A 10 kg vest on an 80 kg lifter moves the effective MET up noticeably.
• Move faster. Vigorous effort roughly doubles the MET value from 3.8 to 8.0, and doubles your burn per minute.
• Harder variations. Decline, archer, and one-arm push-ups increase the load and the demand, moving you up the intensity scale.
• Shorten rest. Keep moving with minimal rest between sets, and heart rate stays elevated across the whole session.
• Use supersets. Pair push-ups with pulling work or squats to turn them into conditioning.

Notice what is not on the list: a slower tempo. A 5-second lowering burns more per rep than a 1-second drop, but you complete far fewer reps, and the per-minute burn comes out similar. The push-up cadence guide goes into why tempo changes the training stimulus but not the calorie math much.

One more honest note on weight loading. The reason adding load raises the burn is the same reason it raises the strength stimulus: more force produced through the same range. A weighted push-up at 8.0 MET effort is genuinely harder work than a bodyweight set at 3.8 MET. But even at the vigorous end of the scale, a 10-minute weighted session stays under 150 kcal for most people. Loaded push-ups are a strength tool with a modest conditioning side effect, not a substitute for cardio.

Push-Ups vs Other Exercises

To put the numbers in perspective: a 70 kg person burns about 4.7 kcal/min doing moderate push-ups, roughly 5 kcal/min walking briskly, and 10-13 kcal/min running at a steady pace. Push-ups sit at the low end because they are an intermittent strength exercise: you are not continuously moving your whole body through space.

That does not make push-ups worthless; it means their value is muscle and strength, not energy expenditure. For fat loss, combine push-ups with aerobic work and a calorie deficit. The push-up test is still worth tracking, because your push-up capacity is itself a health marker (Yang et al., 2019).

The intensity split is worth understanding when you read other sources. The Compendium lists 3.8 MET for light-to-moderate calisthenics and 8.0 MET for vigorous calisthenics, and you should think of those as the two bookends. A steady, comfortable set of push-ups where you are never near failure is closer to 3.8; a fast, near-maximum set where your shoulders are burning and you are breathing hard is closer to 8.0. Most real push-up training falls somewhere between, which is why the honest answer to the headline question is usually a range rather than a single number.

Calorie Counting Errors

• Doubling down after a hard set. The afterburn effect of strength work is real but small, roughly a few extra calories over the following hours, not a license to eat back the session twice over.
• Confusing session time with exercise time. A 12-minute push-up session with rests contains maybe 5 minutes of actual movement. Use the working minutes, not the elapsed minutes, when you estimate the burn.
• Estimating per rep instead of per minute. Rep counts swing wildly with tempo. Minutes at a given MET are a stabler basis for estimation than rep math, which is why the tables on this page lead with time.

Tracking the Strength Side

For the strength side of the equation, compare your max push-up count to published norms with the push-up test, and see your pressing strength relative to body weight with the strength-to-weight ratio. If you are tempted to chase the daily volume angle, read the honest breakdown of 100 push-ups a day first, and follow the push-up progression to make every rep count for strength.

If you want a number for your own weight right now, the equation is two steps. Take your weight in kilograms, multiply by 3.5, multiply by your effort level (use 3.8 moderate or 8.0 vigorous), and divide by 200. That gives kcal per minute. Multiply by the working minutes in your session, and you have a defensible estimate that beats any wrist tracker for a strength session. It takes ten seconds and removes the guesswork.

Use the calorie math to inform, not to punish yourself. The point of this guide is not to talk you out of push-ups, it is to make sure you are doing them for the right reason. Push-ups are an excellent, equipment-free way to build pressing strength and muscle. They are a terrible way to burn calories, and pretending otherwise leads to disappointment and, usually, a sore ego and a sore chest.