Calories burned at the gym: weights, treadmill, bike and HIIT with real data

Published on 26 September 2026

An hour of weight training burns between 210 and 450 kcal for a 75-kilo person, and probably less than your watch says. A table by activity with 2024 Compendium values, how to calculate yours and how much afterburn really adds.

An hour of weight training burns between 210 and 450 kilocalories for a 75-kilo person, depending on how intense it is. Half an hour walking at a brisk pace on the treadmill, about 145. These are real figures, calculated with the Compendium of Physical Activities, the scientific reference researchers use to measure energy expenditure. And they are probably lower than what your watch or the machine's screen shows.

What really counts is your total daily expenditure, which you can estimate with the maintenance calorie calculator.

Here are the calories burned at the gym with each activity, how to calculate yours based on your weight, what happens with the famous "afterburn effect" and why gym calories almost never slim you down as much as the calculator promises.

How calories burned at the gym are calculated

The unit is the MET (metabolic equivalent): what you burn at rest, sitting down, equals 1 MET. A 5 MET activity burns five times more than sitting. Since 1 MET is roughly equal to 1 kilocalorie per kilo of body weight per hour, the math is simple:

The MET values come from the 2024 Compendium of Physical Activities (Herrmann and colleagues), the third update of a database that has existed since 1993. The authors reviewed more than 32,000 abstracts and 1,507 full-text articles, extracted 2,356 energy expenditure values, and the result covers 1,114 activities, 912 of them with values measured by calorimetry. This version is adjusted for adults aged 19 to 59.

Table of calories burned at the gym by activity

Two important caveats. First, these are gross figures: they include what you would have burned anyway without training, around 1 MET. The expenditure the exercise adds is somewhat lower; for an hour of moderate weights at 75 kg, about 190 kcal instead of 265. Second, they are average values: your actual expenditure can vary with your body composition, your technique and how much you rest.

HIIT deserves a separate note. At 11 MET it's the most intense activity on the list, but nobody can keep that pace for an hour: a real 20-minute session, for a 75 kg person, comes to around 275 kcal. We compare its real advantages in HIIT or moderate cardio.

How many calories a weight training session burns

Weights have a reputation for burning little, and the table explains why: a good part of the session is rest between sets. But the effort does count, and there are studies that have measured it directly.

Falcone and colleagues (2015) measured nine active men, averaging about 87 kg, during 30 minutes of four different activities. With weights at 75% of their max they burned 8.83 kcal per minute; on the treadmill, 9.48; on the bike, 9.23; and with high-intensity intervals, 12.62. Over half an hour, weights came to about 265 kcal versus 285 on the treadmill: a much smaller difference than is usually believed.

Volume also changes the result. In the study by Mookerjee and colleagues (2016), 24 young adults did five upper-body exercises with either one or three sets per exercise. The three-set version burned 167.9 gross kcal versus 71.3 for the single-set version; the rate of expenditure per minute was similar, so the difference came from training longer. Men burned more than women in both protocols.

The afterburn effect: how much you burn after training

After training, your body keeps consuming a bit more oxygen than normal while it recovers. It's called EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) and it's the source of the "burns fat for 24 hours" promises.

The review by LaForgia, Withers and Gore (2006) put the numbers in their place. EPOC increases with intensity and duration, and only lasts between 3 and 24 hours with demanding stimuli: at least 50 minutes at 70% or more of maximal oxygen uptake, or about 6 minutes above maximum in intervals. Even so, even in those cases, EPOC accounts for only between 6 and 15% of the net cost of the exercise itself. If a session makes you burn 300 extra kcal, afterburn adds between 18 and 45 more. It exists, but it doesn't change the math.

Why the gym slims you down less than the calculator says

If an hour of weights burns 265 kcal, three sessions a week would be almost 800 kcal. In theory, that would mean almost half a kilo of fat a month, counting about 7,700 kcal per kilo of fat. In practice, studies find smaller losses, and there are three well-documented reasons.

• We eat more. The analysis by Thomas and colleagues (2012) of exercise interventions concluded that the lower-than-expected weight loss is mainly due to exercise doses lower than they seem, combined with an increase in what we eat.
• The body compensates. In the study by Pontzer and colleagues (2016), with 332 adults from five different populations and expenditure measured with doubly labeled water, total expenditure rose with physical activity at low levels, but plateaued at high levels: the body adapts to keep daily expenditure within a range.
• We move less the rest of the day. After a hard session it's easy to spend the afternoon on the couch and cancel out part of what you burned without noticing. That's why daily steps matter as much as training.

Weights or cardio: which is better for losing fat?

If you only count calories per minute, cardio wins. The trial by Willis and colleagues (2012), with 119 sedentary overweight adults over eight months, confirmed it: the cardio group and the group combining cardio and weights lost more weight and more fat than the weights-only group. But the weights group and the combined group gained more lean mass than the cardio group.

The practical takeaway isn't to pick one, but to combine them wisely: cardio adds expenditure and weights protect your muscle while you lose weight, which makes the weight you lose mostly fat. We explain it in how to lose fat without losing muscle and in how to combine cardio and strength training.

Are watch and machine calorie counts reliable?

They're estimates, not measurements. Your watch calculates from your heart rate, your weight and your movement, and the treadmill or elliptical uses general formulas that don't know how much you weigh unless you tell them. With weights the estimate is especially hard, because your heart rate rises and falls between sets without reflecting the muscular work well.

Use them to compare your own sessions with each other, not as an exact number to subtract from your diet. For planning, it's more reliable to estimate your daily expenditure and adjust based on how your weight changes week to week, as we explain in how to calculate your calorie deficit.

How to burn more calories at the gym without living there

• Prioritize big exercises: squats, deadlifts, rows and presses move more muscle and appear in the table with more MET than isolation work.
• More sets, not more rest: as Mookerjee showed, expenditure grows with training volume. Supersets of exercises that don't compete with each other save time.
• Add cardio at the end or on other days: 20-30 minutes of stationary bike or treadmill add up with little interference; zone 2 cardio is a comfortable option.
• Move outside the gym: walking every day usually adds more calories per week than making your sessions longer.

If you want a routine that combines strength and calorie burn without spending hours at the gym, the Progrevia generator tailors it to your fat-loss goal, your level and the days you have available.

Progrevia · Updated 26 September 2026 · How we write our guides

Informational content based on the available scientific evidence: it does not replace advice from a healthcare professional. If you have an injury or a medical condition, or are pregnant, check with one before changing your training or diet.