Burpees burn roughly 10 to 15 calories per minute, depending on your body weight and how fast you move. A 155-pound person doing about 20 burpees per minute burns around 10 calories in that minute. That puts burpees on par with running, making them one of the most efficient calorie-burning exercises you can do with zero equipment.
Calories Burned by Body Weight
Your body weight is the single biggest factor in how many calories you burn doing burpees. A heavier body requires more energy to squat, drop to the floor, and jump back up. At a steady pace of roughly 20 burpees per minute (one every three seconds), here’s what the numbers look like:
- 125 pounds: about 8 calories per minute
- 155 pounds: about 10 calories per minute
- 185 pounds: about 12 calories per minute
Over a 10-minute session, that translates to 80 to 120 calories. A 20-minute burpee-heavy workout could burn 160 to 240 calories before factoring in rest periods. In practice, most people can’t sustain a full 20 minutes of nonstop burpees, so the real number depends on how your workout is structured and how much rest you take between sets.
What Makes Burpees So Effective
Burpees burn more calories than most bodyweight exercises because they recruit muscles across your entire body in a single movement. Each rep works your legs, hips, glutes, core, chest, arms, and shoulders as you cycle through a squat, a plank, a push-up, and an explosive jump. That level of full-body muscle activation drives your heart rate up fast and keeps your energy expenditure high.
The Compendium of Physical Activities, a standard reference for exercise intensity, assigns burpees a MET value of 7.5 when performed as part of vigorous calisthenics. When done in a high-intensity interval format (think Tabata-style sets), that value jumps to 11.0. For context, a MET of 11.0 is roughly equivalent to running at a 7-minute mile pace. The harder you push and the less you rest, the closer you get to that upper range.
How Burpees Compare to Running
Running burns about 10.8 to 16 calories per minute, depending on your weight and speed. Burpees fall in a similar range at 10 to 15 calories per minute. The two exercises are remarkably close in calorie efficiency, but burpees have a practical advantage: you can do them in a small room with no equipment and no warm-up time. The tradeoff is that burpees are much harder to sustain. Most people can run for 30 minutes straight but would struggle to do continuous burpees for even five.
This means running typically wins for total calorie burn in a single session simply because you can do it longer. But if you’re short on time, a 10-minute burst of burpees can match or beat a 10-minute jog.
The Afterburn Effect Adds Extra Calories
Burpees don’t just burn calories while you’re doing them. High-intensity exercises that use your body weight, including burpees, trigger what’s called the afterburn effect: your body continues consuming extra oxygen and burning calories after the workout ends. This post-exercise calorie burn typically adds 6% to 15% on top of what you burned during the session itself.
So if your burpee workout burned 200 calories, you can expect an additional 12 to 30 calories in the hours afterward. That’s modest on its own, but it adds up across weeks of consistent training. The afterburn effect is strongest after anaerobic, high-intensity work, which is exactly what burpees deliver. Estimates for how long it lasts range from 15 minutes to 48 hours, with more intense sessions producing a longer effect.
How Your Pace Changes the Math
Not everyone does 20 burpees a minute, and your pace matters a lot. A study published in the Journal of Human Kinetics established fitness standards based on a 3-minute burpee test for adults aged 18 to 25. The results give a useful sense of how pace varies across fitness levels:
For men, an average performer completed 47 to 66 burpees in three minutes (roughly 16 to 22 per minute). Those rated “very good” hit 76 to 85 in three minutes, or about 25 to 28 per minute. For women, the average range was 37 to 60 in three minutes (12 to 20 per minute), with top performers reaching 72 to 83.
If you’re a beginner doing 10 to 12 burpees per minute, you’ll burn fewer calories per minute than someone cranking out 25. But you’re also likely working close to your maximum effort, which means the relative intensity on your body is similar. As your fitness improves and your pace increases, your per-minute calorie burn goes up with it.
Calorie Burn Per Single Burpee
At the standard pace of 20 per minute, each individual burpee burns roughly 0.4 to 0.6 calories depending on your weight. That sounds tiny, but it accumulates quickly. Doing 100 burpees, a popular fitness challenge, burns approximately 40 to 60 calories for most people. At a slower pace, each rep takes longer and burns slightly more per burpee (since your body is working for more seconds), but your overall calories per minute drop.
The per-rep number is useful if you track your workouts by counting reps rather than time. For a quick estimate, multiply your total burpees by 0.5 and you’ll be in the right ballpark for someone in the 150 to 170 pound range.
How to Maximize Calorie Burn
The simplest way to burn more calories with burpees is to include a full push-up at the bottom and an explosive jump at the top. Skipping either one reduces the range of motion and muscle involvement, lowering the energy cost per rep. A full-depth burpee with a chest-to-floor push-up and a high jump will land you closer to the 11.0 MET intensity rating, while a half-effort version stays nearer to 7.5.
Structuring your workout as intervals also helps. Rather than doing burpees at a moderate pace for several minutes, try 30 seconds of all-out effort followed by 15 to 30 seconds of rest. This interval approach pushes your heart rate higher, burns more calories per working minute, and amplifies the afterburn effect afterward. It also makes the workout sustainable enough that you can get through 15 to 20 minutes of total work without your form falling apart, which matters for both calorie burn and injury prevention.