Recommendations for beginners are to select a weight no more than 10% of your bodyweight, and to gradually build up to 15% or higher.Therefore, if you were to carry 10% of your bodyweight in a weighted backpack, you can expect calorie burn to increase by around 10% as well. With the superior method for measuring calorie expenditure in research papers I’d be more confident assuming that calorie burn increases in line with additional weight. This aligns with my perception that there was a noticeable increase in effort levels when my weighted backpack was 25kg or higher. For this I’ve switched the x-axis back to additional weight in kg for clarity. One other metric I was tracking was average heart rate. The result is the line in blue.Īdditional Load Carried vs Average Heart Rate From there I can then increase my calorie burn by the same percentage as the additional load I carry. This is considered brisk walking at 3.5mph and is assuming no additional weight.

Using the same method of starting with my BMR and then using the MET value for my walking speed I obtain a personal value of 293 calories an hour. The 72kg female would carry 10.8kg in a backpack and burn 202 calories an hour (previously 176).

Referring back to the examples, the 85kg male would carry an additional 12.75kg and burn 258 calories an hour (previously 224). If you were carrying 15% extra weight you might expect to burn 15% more calories than usual. While there’s some individual variation, there’s quite good alignment around a 1:1 relationship between additional load and calorie burn. Now that we’ve calculated the calories burned walking, we can dig into the research to see how many more calories we might burn with a weighted backpack. Female example, 72kg, 164cm, walking 2.5mph would burn (1409 / 24) * 3 = 176 calories an hour.Male example, 85kg, 178cm, walking 2.5mph would burn (1793 / 24) * 3 = 224 calories an hour.We’ll need to take the calories burned in a day (24 hours), divide it by 24 (to get one hour) and multiply it by the MET value of walking 2.5mph (x3).

Again to keep the example clear, we’ll say the walk is exactly one hour long. Now all you need to know is the duration of the activity. The value of 3.0 means that you burn three times as many calories walking 2.5mph as you do when sitting. Example of walking activities in a METs table – some very specific types of walking!įor simplicity we can select 2.5mph and a MET value of 3.0.

Brisk walking calorie burn