How Many Calories Do You Burn When Running a Mile?

What Affects How Many Calories You Burn

Your metabolic rate determines how quickly you burn calories, and every individual’s metabolism is unique. Metabolic rate is made up of a complex set of factors that determine how quickly you process the nutrients from the food you eat.

While metabolic rate is difficult to calculate, there are other factors that you can identify that will help determine how many calories you burn during a run. Here are some of the key components of how you burn calories.

Weight

The more you weigh, the more calories you’ll burn during a run, because you have to put more effort into moving that weight over the distance, which increases your calorie expenditure. Weight is one of the main factors in determining calorie burn while running.

Exercise Intensity

High-intensity exercise, when you are breathing heavily enough that it is hard to speak more than a few words at a time, can burn many more calories than jogging at a leisurely pace. If the terrain is flat, like a track, you expend less energy than running through the hills.

However, if you prefer a gentle pace, you can still burn the same total calories as a faster runner simply by going farther for longer.

Age

With age, people start to lose muscle mass, which slows down how much energy (calories) they expend. Around the age of 40, the body begins to process protein less efficiently, which is necessary for maintaining muscle strength. There is also some evidence that the quality as well as the quantity of muscle tissue changes as people age, and that affects strength and consequently the ability to run as far or as fast.

Fitness

The more fit you are, the fewer calories you tend to burn during a mile run. When you run consistently, your body becomes more efficient and it takes less energy (calories) to go the same distance. However, if you run on a regular basis, you’re likely to be able to run farther and faster, which will ramp up your calorie burn.

Sex

Males burn more calories than females due to having more muscle mass and a higher body weight, on average. Muscles have insulin receptors that metabolize blood sugar, so if you have more muscle mass, you process sugar for energy (burn calories) more quickly.

Females tend to have more body fat and less muscle mass than males, resulting in a generally slower metabolism.

How to Calculate Your Calorie Burn

Many types of fitness devices calculate calorie burn for you, but you can also use a formula to measure calorie expenditure, known as the metabolic equivalent of task (MET). MET quantifies the intensity of an activity, using the amount of oxygen used while at rest as a baseline of 1 MET, The more intense the activity, the higher the MET.

For weight-bearing activities like running, it uses weight in kilograms (kg) in the calculation. One MET equals 1 calorie per kilogram of body weight per hour.

The steps to calculate calorie burn manually using MET are:

1. Find the MET value of your activity, which is available online. For example, the MET value for running 6 miles per hour (mph) is 9.3.
2. Convert your weight in pounds to weight in kilograms by dividing the number of pounds by 2.2. If you weigh 150 pounds, for instance, you’d weigh 68.18 kilograms.
3. Plug those numbers into the following formula:

MET x kg body weight / 60 = calories used per minute

For a 150-pound person running at 6 mph (10 minutes per mile), that translates to:

9.8 x 68.18/200 = 10.57 calories burned per minute. So if you run a 10-minute mile, you’ll burn about 105.7 calories.

How to Boost Your Calorie Burn

Look at the variables you can control when you run if you want to boost how much energy and calories you are expending. While weight is the most significant factor, intensity and duration matter as well. You can boost your burn by:

• Running faster
• Running longer
• Running on an incline or over varied terrain
• Wearing a weighted vest or using other tools to add weight

Summary

The number of calories a person burns during a mile run averages around 100, but there is a lot of variation among individuals. Your weight, metabolic rate, age, fitness level, sex, and muscle mass are all factors in how many calories you will use. Increasing the intensity or duration of your run will burn more calories, as will carrying some additional weight.