MET Minutes Calculator — weekly MET-minutes from four activities

A MET-minute is one minute of activity multiplied by that activity's metabolic equivalent value. It exists because raw minutes are a poor way to compare a walk with a hard cycling session, and because researchers needed one number that could summarise a whole week of mixed activity. This MET minutes calculator totals up to four activities into weekly MET-minutes, splits the total by intensity band, and shows how each activity contributes.

Arb Digital builds free calculators that show their working, and this one is deliberately built around inputs you supply rather than a built-in activity list. MET values are published, they are specific to the exact activity and speed, and they get revised — so the calculator asks you to bring the value from the source rather than quietly assuming one on your behalf.

What This MET Minutes Calculator Does

For each activity you enter a MET value, the length of a typical session in minutes, and how many of those sessions you do in a week. The calculator multiplies those three numbers together for each row and adds the rows into a weekly MET-minute total. It also reports total active minutes, the split between moderate-intensity and vigorous-intensity MET-minutes using the standard intensity cut-points, and an optional energy estimate in kilocalories based on your body weight.

The bar breakdown underneath shows what share of your weekly MET-minutes each activity is responsible for. That is often more revealing than the total: people are frequently surprised to find that a short, hard session contributes more weighted volume than several longer easy ones, or the reverse.

This is a weekly aggregation tool. If you want the energy cost of a single session instead, our calories burned calculator handles one activity at a time in kilocalories, and there are activity-specific versions for walking, running and cycling. This page does the opposite job: it rolls a whole week up into one intensity-weighted number.

How to Use It

1. Look up your MET values first. Open the Compendium of Physical Activities and find the code that matches what you actually do, including the speed or effort description. Walking at two different speeds carries two different MET values.
2. Enter one activity per row. Put the MET value in the first box, a typical session length in the second, and the number of sessions per week in the third.
3. Use realistic session lengths. Enter moving time, not the time from leaving the house to getting back. Warm-up and rest between sets are not the same intensity as the work.
4. Add your body weight if you want the energy figure. MET-minutes are independent of weight; the kilocalorie estimate is not.
5. Read the bars. They show which activity is actually carrying your week, which is usually the most useful output on the page.

The Formula and How It Is Calculated

One MET is the rate of energy expenditure at rest. The Compendium of Physical Activities defines it as approximately 1 kcal per kilogram of body weight per hour, or an oxygen uptake of about 3.5 millilitres per kilogram per minute. An activity rated at 6 METs therefore costs roughly six times the resting rate while you are doing it.

MET-minutes follow directly:

MET-minutes = MET value × minutes × sessions per week

Summed across activities, that gives the weekly total shown in the hero figure. Intensity is split using the conventional cut-points: activities below 3 METs are light, 3 to 5.9 METs are moderate, and 6 METs and above are vigorous. The calculator assigns each row's MET-minutes to the band its MET value falls in.

The kilocalorie estimate uses the standard conversion from METs to energy: kcal per minute = MET × 3.5 × body weight in kg ÷ 200. For a 70 kg person at 4 METs that is 4.9 kcal per minute, so 150 minutes at that intensity comes to about 735 kcal. Treat that as an order-of-magnitude estimate — it assumes a standard resting metabolic rate per kilogram, which varies between individuals and is affected by body composition.

What the Published Guidelines Actually Say

The World Health Organization's physical activity fact sheet states that adults should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week, or an equivalent amount of vigorous activity, and that muscle-strengthening activity should be included. The American College of Sports Medicine's summary of the physical activity guidelines describes the same volume expressed as 30 minutes on five days a week of moderate activity, or 20 minutes on three days of vigorous activity, plus strength work at least twice weekly.

Those are statements of what the guidelines contain. They are not a target this page is setting for you, and the calculator deliberately does not grade, score or colour-code your result. What the arithmetic does let you see is the relationship between the two forms of the recommendation: 150 minutes at a mid-moderate intensity of about 4 METs comes to roughly 600 MET-minutes, and 75 minutes at a mid-vigorous 8 METs comes to the same figure. That equivalence is why the guidelines can express the same recommendation in two different ways.

Anyone with a medical condition, a recent injury, or symptoms during exertion should be guided by their own clinician rather than by any general guideline, and certainly not by a web calculator.

Why MET-Minutes Beat Raw Minutes

Counting minutes treats a gentle stroll and an interval session as interchangeable, which is obviously wrong. Counting calories introduces body weight, which makes two people doing identical training look different for reasons that have nothing to do with the training. MET-minutes sit between the two: they weight time by intensity, and they are independent of body mass, so the same session produces the same MET-minutes for everyone.

That is precisely why epidemiological research on activity and health outcomes tends to be expressed in MET-hours or MET-minutes per week rather than in sessions or kilocalories. It is a unit designed for comparing populations and weeks, not for prescribing a workout. Keep that in mind when reading your own number: it is a volume measure, and volume is only one dimension of training.

Where MET Values Mislead

A MET value is an average measured across a group of people doing a described activity. Several things it cannot capture are worth knowing.

Fitness changes the cost. A trained runner and an untrained one at the same pace are not working equally hard relative to their own capacity, even though the Compendium assigns one MET value to that pace. MET values describe absolute intensity, not relative effort. If you want a relative measure, heart-rate-based or capacity-based approaches such as our VO₂ max calculator speak to that instead.

Efficiency and technique matter. Swimming is the classic example: a poor swimmer expends dramatically more energy per length than an efficient one at the same speed. A single MET figure for "swimming, freestyle, moderate effort" averages across both.

Intermittent activity is hard to time. Resistance training, tennis and most team sports involve bursts and pauses. A MET value for the sport assumes a typical work-to-rest pattern, and yours may not match it. Entering the full session length for a sport with long stoppages will overstate the total.

Age and body composition shift the baseline. The Compendium publishes a separate Older Adult Compendium precisely because the resting metabolic assumption behind one MET does not hold uniformly across ages, and a Wheelchair Activities Compendium for activities the standard tables do not cover.

Using the Bars to Audit a Week

The breakdown bars answer a question the total cannot: where is your weekly volume actually coming from? A common pattern is someone who trains hard twice a week and walks a lot, and assumes the training is the bulk of it. Enter the numbers and the walking frequently turns out to be the larger share, because it accumulates so many more minutes even at a lower MET value.

The reverse pattern shows up too. Someone doing three hard sessions and very little else can find that a single injury or a busy fortnight removes most of their weekly volume at once, because it was concentrated in a few high-MET hours with nothing underneath it. Neither pattern is right or wrong; seeing which one you have is the useful part.

If you track daily steps, converting them adds a fourth row easily. Our steps to miles calculator turns a step count into distance and our steps to calories calculator into energy, either of which gives you the minutes figure to enter here alongside a walking MET value from the Compendium.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Guessing MET values instead of looking them up. The difference between walking at 2.5 mph and 4 mph is large, and using the wrong row of the Compendium changes the total materially.
• Counting elapsed time rather than active time. A two-hour gym visit is rarely two hours of activity at the MET value you entered.
• Double-counting. If your step count already includes your walk to work, do not also enter that walk as a separate activity.
• Treating MET-minutes as calories. They are intensity-weighted minutes. The kilocalorie figure here is a separate, weight-dependent estimate with its own error range.
• Reading a total as a verdict. The number describes volume. It says nothing about strength, mobility, recovery or whether the activity suits you, and it is not a health assessment.

Related Free Tools From Arb Digital

For the energy cost of one session rather than a week, use the calories burned calculator or the swimming calorie calculator. For pacing rather than volume, the running pace calculator and cycling pace calculator convert between speed, distance and time. Our TDEE calculator estimates total daily energy expenditure including activity, and the stride length calculator covers the mechanics of how those walking minutes are made up. The full free online tools hub lists the rest.

Frequently Asked Questions

This calculator reports published arithmetic only and is not medical advice, a fitness assessment, or a training prescription. Discuss any change to your activity with a physician or a qualified exercise professional, particularly if you have a health condition, an injury, or symptoms during exertion.