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wondered what it meant? MET stands for metabolic equivalent, which is one
way that exercise physiologists estimate how many calories are burned during
physical activity. Having a basic understanding of METs and how to use them
can help you determine the best physical activities to help your clients achieve
their health and fitness goals.
METs are used to estimate the energy expenditure for many common physical
activities. One MET is an individual’s resting metabolic rate (RMR) and is
approximately 3.5 milliliters of oxygen consumed per kilogram bodyweight per
minute (mL/kg/min) and represents the amount of oxygen used by the body
while at rest (such as what you’re doing right now while reading this article).
An activity that is 4 METs requires the body to use approximately four times
as much oxygen than when at rest, which means it requires more energy and
burns more calories.
If your clients’ fitness goals include weight loss, understanding which physical
activities help burn the most calories can help you determine the most
effective activities they should be doing to meet those goals. Here are five
things to understand about METs and how to use them when designing
programs for your clients:
Researchers have assigned MET values for everything from many common
types of exercise to relatively obscure activities like pulling a rickshaw. For
example, walking at a moderate pace of 2.8-3.2 miles per hour (mph) on a
level, firm surface is approximately 3.5 METs, which means that the body is
using 3.5 times the amount of oxygen than is required when sitting still at rest.
Running at 7.0 mph, which allows you to cover one mile in approximately 8.5
minutes, has a MET value of 11.0 (meaning your body uses approximately
three times the amount of oxygen used while walking and 11 times more
oxygen than sitting at rest). By the way, pulling a rickshaw is 6.3 METs.
2. If you know the MET value of a physical activity, the duration of that
activity and a little about the person participating in the activity, you can
estimate how many calories a minute that individual should burn doing
that activity.
Ask your client to pick a favorite physical activity or mode of exercise and plug
the MET value into the formula below to see how many calories they burn per
minute and whether or not hey should increase the level of intensity or
duration to help achieve a specific goal like weight loss:
Using the formula, you can determine how long it would be necessary to
perform a given activity to burn the equivalent of 1 pound of fat. For example,
using the example above, Shane would have to ride his bike at 12 mph, which
burns 12.4 calories per minute, for 283 minutes to burn one pound of fat. If his
goal is to lose 10 pounds of body fat, he will have to cycle for 2,830 minutes or
47 hours, which is more than the equivalent of a full week of work.
Using the MET values for sitting and standing, we can see that Shane can
burn almost 30 percent MORE calories by simply standing instead of sitting
for one hour. Taking it a step further, we can see that it will take Shane about
1,250 minutes (approximately 21 hours) of standing to burn 1 pound of fat.
Doing chores, while not exactly fun, can be physically demanding and an
excellent way to burn additional calories without having to carve out time for a
separate exercise session.
It is worth noting that, as stated in the Introduction iton the Compendium, “The
values in the Compendium do not estimate the energy cost of [physical
activity] in individuals in ways that account for differences in body mass,
adiposity, age, sex, efficiency of movement, geographic and environmental
conditions in which the activities are performed….the true energy cost for an
individual may or may not be close to the stated mean MET value as
presented.” In other words, MET values can provide a broad estimate for how
many calories are being used, but it isn’t exact. However, they still can be
helpful in planning more efficient workouts and estimating how many calories
are being used during a wide range of activities, including yard work, running
errands or hitting the gym for your favorite workout.
Activity METs