MET Minutes Calculator — Weekly Dose

Public health’s favourite unit of exercise dose is the MET-minute: intensity multiplied by time. A brisk walk, a run and a swim become directly comparable once each is priced in METs, and this calculator totals a session — or a whole week’s mixed activity, added session by session — against the 500 to 1,000 MET-minutes per week that guidelines target.

Dose, Not Just Minutes

The 150-minutes-a-week guideline everyone quotes is secretly a MET-minute prescription wearing a disguise. Moderate activity (3–6 METs) for 150 minutes yields 450–900 MET-minutes; vigorous activity above 6 METs needs only 75 minutes to reach the same territory — which is exactly how the WHO's guidelines are structured, and why the research literature (and the IPAQ scoring system used in population surveys worldwide) standardised on 500–1,000 MET-minutes per week as the target zone. The unit's power is comparability: a week of dog-walking, gardening and one hard swim cannot be summed in minutes or miles, but it sums instantly in MET-minutes, because intensity has been priced into the currency. This calculator's activity list carries the Compendium of Physical Activities' standard values for the common cases; enter minutes honestly and the dose arithmetic does itself.

Worked Example: Forty-Five Minutes of Running

The defaults: running at 5 mph, a Compendium value of 8.3 METs, for 45 minutes. Dose = 8.3 × 45 = 374 MET-minutes (about 6.2 MET-hours) — three-quarters of the week's 500 floor in a single session, which is the arithmetic reason runners meet guidelines on three outings while pure walkers need near-daily appointments: the same floor at the brisk walk's 3.5 METs costs 143 minutes. Neither is superior as health behaviour — adherence outranks intensity in the long literature — but the dose accounting makes the trade visible, and lets a mixed week (two runs, two walks, one lift) be totalled on one line instead of argued about in three units.

Building a Week in the Currency

A worked week shows the bookkeeping's ease. Monday: 30 minutes vigorous cycling at 8 METs = 240. Wednesday: 45 minutes running as above = 374. Friday: an hour of weight training at 6 METs = 360. Saturday: 90 minutes of brisk walking at 3.5 = 315. Total: 1,289 MET-minutes — above the guideline zone's ceiling, in about four hours of clock time, a training load a recreational athlete would recognise as solid base work. The same total priced the other way exposes the sedentary mirror-image: a week whose peak is two 20-minute strolls accumulates barely 150 MET-minutes, and the gap between the two weeks — invisible to step-count arguments — is the entire public-health story in one subtraction.

The Weekend Warrior Verdict

The dose unit settled one of exercise science's friendliest arguments. Large cohort studies comparing exercisers who spread their 500-plus MET-minutes across the week with "weekend warriors" who compress the same dose into one or two days have repeatedly found the mortality benefits broadly comparable — the total dose, not its distribution across days, carries most of the effect. (Musculoskeletal soreness and injury risk may prefer the spreading; the MET ledger is silent there, and honesty requires saying so.) For the calculator's user the verdict licenses the arithmetic this page performs: sum the week's sessions wherever they fell, compare the one total against the zone, and let the calendar arrange itself around your life rather than the guideline's ghost.

The Other Ledger: Sitting and NEAT

MET-minutes also price the day's background, and the numbers surprise. Sitting itself costs about 1.3–1.5 METs — not zero, which is why basal existence accumulates a large, useless total that no guideline counts. What the research on non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) adds is that the light movement layered over sitting is neither basal nor exercise and quietly sums: two cumulative hours of pottering, standing and short walks at about 2.5 METs is 300 MET-minutes — a workout's worth of dose, assembled from errands. It does not replace the training this page's activity list prices (intensity buys adaptations light movement doesn't), but it explains why two people with identical gym weeks and different jobs — a nurse and a desk worker — live at different doses, and why "active couch potato" is a real category in the literature rather than a joke. Even the standing desk enters the ledger honestly: standing prices at roughly 1.8 METs against sitting's 1.3 to 1.5, a real but modest premium whose eight-hour accumulation still totals less than one brisk half-hour walk — the arithmetic that keeps furniture marketing in its place.

Pricing a Working Day

The currency also audits occupations, which is how much of the underlying research was gathered. A hospital nurse's shift — miles of corridor walking interleaved with standing care, averaging perhaps 2.5–3 METs across eight hours — accumulates on the order of 1,200–1,400 MET-minutes of total movement, of which the portions in sustained bouts above the moderate threshold are what guidelines would count. A warehouse picker prices similarly; a long-haul driver, almost entirely at sitting's 1.3–1.5, accumulates a fraction of either despite equal hours and greater fatigue of other kinds. The calculator's session framing fits training best, but the same multiplication explains the epidemiological finding that occupational activity and leisure activity are separate exposures — and why the guideline week must be built deliberately by those whose jobs sit still.

Children, Older Adults and the Same Currency

The dose framework extends across the lifespan with adjusted targets rather than a different arithmetic. Children and adolescents are prescribed an average of 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity daily — in this page's currency, roughly 1,800 or more MET-minutes weekly at the intensities of play and sport, accumulated in the unstructured bursts the IPAQ conventions never anticipated. Older adults are prescribed the same 500–1,000 zone as the general adult population, with balance and strength work named alongside — the dose attainable at walking intensities by design, since the currency prices a 3.5-MET hour identically whoever performs it. One multiplication, every age: that universality is the MET-minute's claim to being public health's common tongue.

Related Tools

More from the Sports Calculators hub: the Bruce Protocol Calculator — where the MET itself comes from, capacity-side — and the Magic Mile Calculator for pricing the runs inside the week.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many MET-minutes per week do I need?

The guideline zone is 500–1,000 MET-minutes weekly for the core health benefits — equivalent to 150 minutes of moderate activity at the low-intensity end, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, or any priced mixture. Benefits continue accruing beyond 1,000 with diminishing returns (studies find gains flattening around 3,000–4,000), and — the finding every sedentary reader should keep — the steepest benefit curve in all of exercise science is the move from near zero to 500.

What is the difference between MET-minutes and MET-hours?

Sixty, literally: MET-hours = MET-minutes ÷ 60. Epidemiology often quotes MET-hours per week (8.3–16.7 corresponds to the 500–1,000 zone); activity trackers and IPAQ scoring quote MET-minutes. The calculator prints both so its output can be seated in either literature without conversion errors — a trivial courtesy that prevents a 60-fold misreading of a training log.

Are the MET values exact for me?

They are population-standard values from the Compendium of Physical Activities — measured averages for the activity as defined, not your personal cost. Individual economy varies by perhaps ±20% with technique, body composition and conditions (a headwind reprices cycling entirely). For dose bookkeeping against guidelines, the standard values are the right tool — the guidelines themselves were built from them — but do not read the third significant figure as physiology.

Does strength training count toward the total?

In MET-minute terms yes (the list prices vigorous lifting at 6 METs), though guidelines additionally recommend muscle-strengthening on two days a week as a separate checkbox, because its benefits (bone, muscle mass, glucose handling) are not exhausted by the aerobic dose number. Log it in both ledgers: the MET total for dose, the days for the strength recommendation. Double-counting anxieties belong to accountants; the guidelines intend both tallies kept.

Why do surveys multiply walking by 3.3 and vigorous by 8?

Those are the IPAQ scoring conventions — standardised multipliers (walking 3.3 METs, moderate activity 4.0, vigorous 8.0) applied to self-reported minutes so populations can be compared on one ruler. If your week is being scored for a study, those are the prices; for personal bookkeeping, the Compendium's activity-specific values in this calculator are the finer instrument. The two systems agree in structure — intensity × time, summed — and differ only in granularity.

Can MET-minutes estimate calories?

Approximately: one MET is about 1 kcal per kilogram per hour, so calories ≈ METs × body weight (kg) × hours. A 75 kg runner's worked-example session: 8.3 × 75 × 0.75 ≈ 467 kcal. This page leaves calorie arithmetic to the hub's dedicated calorie calculators, which carry the fuller method; the MET-minute's own job is dose comparability, and it does it without needing your weight at all — part of its elegance as a public-health unit.