Here’s How Many Calories You Really Burn While Running

There’s a long-held heuristic in running that says you burn around 100 calories for every mile run.

But that 100-calories-per-mile factoid is incorrect for 99% of runners. It has stuck around for so long only because it’s easy to remember. 

It’s relatively accurate for a runner who weighs 133 pounds, but off base for everyone else. That’s a problem. Because if you’re running to lose weight, or to maintain your weight, you’ve got to nail this pivotal number from the get-go.

To find your own, personalized calorie-burn-per-mile, you could immerse yourself in physiology texts, or simply use the simple formula I’ll provide right now: Multiply your weight in pounds by 0.75. 

If you weigh 100 pounds, you burn 75 calories per mile. If you weigh 200 pounds, you burn 150/mile.

If you’re on the Metric system, the numbers work like this: The total calories you burn per kilometer is equal to your weight in kilograms x 1.04. If you weigh 80 kilograms, you burn 83.2 calories per kilometer.

There’s one more thing you should understand about calorie-burn while exercising. Everything presented so far relates to “gross calorie burn.” That’s the way people talk about calorie expenditure in general, but it’s a bit misleading.  

Why? Because even if you’re not running, your body burns calories as part of its Resting Metabolic Rate. For example, a 150-pound adult burns about 65 calories per hour while sedentary – like watching TV. When you subtract your RMR from your calorie burn while running, your “net calorie burn” drops to .72/pound (or 1.0/kg).

The following table shows a wide range of weights and calorie burns in both the American and Metric systems.

Your Calorie Burn While Running In Both Pounds And Kilograms

This Isn’t Big News. But It Is Important.

These numbers for calorie burn while running aren’t exactly a big news development. They have been known since 1963 when they were revealed in an article titled “Energy cost of running” in the Journal of Applied Physiology.¹ That paper by Margaria and colleagues is one of the most famous in the history of running.

Since 1963, Margaria’s findings have been verified by many subsequent experiments, and adopted by the American College of Sports Medicine in its “Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription.” They are used by anyone who is serious about determining how running can contribute to weight-loss. In an era of rampant obesity and efforts to curtail it, accurate data is a crucial starting point.

The above formulas and table simplify the data. They’re not 100% accurate for everyone, because many different factors have a small effect on your energy cost while running: age, sex, pace, muscle, hills, weather, etc. 

Still, the formulas are about 98 percent accurate, and way better than that mythic round number–100 calories/mile. The formulas are personalized to your body weight, which is the major calorie-burn factor by far.

Many people have trouble accepting that walking a mile burns as many calories as running a mile. Sorry, it’s true. You just can’t mess with the laws of physics.

However, you can run a mile in half the time it takes you to walk a mile, or maybe even just one-third the time. That means running is two to three times more efficient than walking (per minute or hour, and these time units are the way we organize our lives, so they’re important.)

You might have heard that running produces an “after burn,” or additional calories burned after you complete your run. This is a real thing called EPOC (Excess Post exercise Oxygen Consumption) by scientists, but it doesn’t add a lot of additional calories to your run.

EPOC is mostly determined by the intensity or pace of your run². If you run a hard 6 miles, you might burn an additional 50 to 100 calories in total after finishing your run. On the other hand, if you do an easy 6 mile run, you only get an extra 15 to 30 calories of after-burn.

To determine your calorie burn from other popular activities like bicycling and swimming, consult the deep, authoritative Compendium of Physical Activities. It includes everything from housework to dancing to playing musical instruments (drums score high!) to sexual activity (not so high).

For example, to burn the same total calories as you would during an 8:00-minute mile, you’d have to ride your bike for 8 minutes at 16mph to 17mph, or swim the crawl stroke at a quite-hard effort.

Go here for a handy Marathon Handbook Calorie Calculator that includes more than 800 activities from the Compendium. You can personalize it to your weight and typical running pace.

Is Running Good For Weight Loss?

Of course it is. But the best way to supercharge your weight-loss efforts is to eat less, not to run more.

For many runners, the math seems simple: Grind out more miles, burn more calories, and watch the pounds disappear. There are thousands of stories of runners who have lost significant weight by doing exactly this. 

You get fitter, and you get leaner. Bingo! It’s a beautiful world.

But things don’t always work out that way. Everyone’s physiology is different, and there’s no guarantee that running will help you lose weight.

Indeed, studies have consistently found that reducing calorie consumption beats increasing calorie burn. One simple reason: It only takes about 5 minutes to wolf down a morning muffin that contains 500 calories. But it might take 30 to 45 minutes of hard running to burn that many calories. 

A big systematic review and meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association³ showed that subjects on a reduced calorie diet could expect to lose 12 to 20 pounds over 6 months vs an exercise group that experienced minimal or no weight loss. A prior study in the International Journal of Obesity⁴ investigated 33 weight loss studies, concluding that exercise can help to maintain weight loss, but any loss itself will likely come from lower calorie consumption.

Nutritionists and registered dieticians advise clients that they can achieve their optimal weight loss by reducing calories, maintaining protein, and increasing fiber through a diet that focuses on whole grains, fruits and vegetables, healthy meats/fish, lowfat dairy, and monounsaturated oils like olive oil.

What If You Don’t Lose Weight Through Running?

Keep running anyway. There have been literally thousands of studies showing that exercise alone (even without weight loss) improves physical and cognitive health. One famous series of studies explored what came to be known as the Fat But Fit paradox.

The outcome: subjects who were fat but fit (because they exercised consistently) were healthier than subjects much leaner who didn’t exercise. A modest body weight is generally a good thing, but it can’t compare with the health, longevity, and energy impact of increased fitness.

Here’s how one of those studies put it, bluntly and clearly: “Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is a more powerful predictor of mortality than body mass index or adiposity, and improving CRF is more important than losing body fat for reducing risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality.”

There are many reasons why exercise is such a powerful health-enhancer, including these key contributors: It strengthens your heart, it improves flexibility of your blood vessels, it improves your insulin sensitivity, and it builds and maintains healthy muscles.  

In 2015, top Swedish researchers published one of the most famous exercise papers of all time, titled “Exercise as medicine – evidence for prescribing exercise as therapy in 26 different chronic diseases.”⁵ In this paper, they identified 26 lifestyle diseases that could be significantly reduced by a regular exercise program. 

These ranged from the well-known–heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes–to less discussed ills like depression, asthma, Parkinsons, back pain, and certain cancers. 

The authors weren’t aiming for one big benefit for every mile of a marathon. That’s just where their analysis fell. But it makes an excellent pneumonic to help you remember how running can improve your health and your life.

The Running and Weight Loss Story In Context

Running has always been a great way to burn calories, and it always will be. Doesn’t really matter whether you burn 100 calories per mile, or more (as is likely for many), or less.

Running is a high-burn activity because you must support your full body weight while hopping vigorously from foot to foot. You won’t easily find another activity that burns more calories per hour. So you can feel confident that running can contribute to a leaner, healthier you.

At the same time, you should understand that a well-planned, reduced-calorie diet is the first step to weight-loss. The sugary, high-fat processed foods that you don’t eat will do more to tip the bathroom scale than any number of weekly miles.

Most importantly, remember this: Running will boost your health and vigor even if you don’t lose weight. 

Don’t obsess about calories per mile, or your likely finish time in an upcoming half marathon. Create a world where running is part of your daily reward system, and running will reward you back, many times over.

REFERENCES

1 Margaria, R., Cerretelli, P., Aghemo, P., & Sassi, G. (1963). Energy cost of running. Journal of Applied Physiology, 18(2), 367–370. https://doi.org/10.1152/jappl.1963.18.2.367  

2 Børsheim, E., & Bahr, R. (2003). Effect of exercise intensity, duration and mode on post-exercise oxygen consumption. Sports Medicine, 33(14), 1037–1060. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Effect-of-Exercise-Intensity,-Duration-and-Mode-on-B%C3%B8rsheim-Bahr/cecfa5ba4a9670e6965132d51a5689edffda4538 

3 Franz, M. J., VanWormer, J. J., Crain, A. L., Boucher, J. L., Histon, T., Caplan, W., Bowman, J. D., & Pronk, N. P. (2007). Weight-loss outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis of weight-loss clinical trials with a minimum 1-year follow-up. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 107(10), 1755–1767. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jada.2007.07.017

4 Curioni, C. C., & Lourenço, P. M. (2005). Long-term weight loss after diet and exercise: A systematic review. International Journal of Obesity, 29(10), 1168–1174. https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ijo.0803015 

5 Gaesser, G. A., Tucker, W. J., Jarrett, C. L., & Angadi, S. S. (2015). Fitness versus fatness: Which influences health and mortality risk the most? Current Sports Medicine Reports, 14(4), 327–332. https://doi.org/10.1249/jsr.0000000000000170 

6 Pedersen, B. K., & Saltin, B. (2015). Exercise as medicine – evidence for prescribing exercise as therapy in 26 different chronic diseases. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 25(Suppl 3), 1–72. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26606383/