Estimate calories burned doing burpees.
Burpees are counted in reps rather than minutes, so costing them means converting a rep count into time first — reps divided by cadence — and then applying an intensity that depends on that cadence. A burpee is a full-body movement with a squat, a plank, a press and a jump, and the metabolic cost climbs steeply with pace: around eight METs at a steady ten reps a minute, rising past twelve at twenty, because there is no recovery between reps. That is roughly 0.10 to 0.16 kcal per rep for a 75 kg person, which is why the widely repeated claim that a burpee burns a calliope of calories does not survive arithmetic — a hundred burpees is a genuine fifty to sixty kilocalories, and the real value is the conditioning stimulus rather than the burn.
Calories from a burpee rep count
Minutes = reps / cadence; MET = 6 + 0.28 x cadence, capped at 14; calories per minute = MET x 3.5 x weight / 200; calories = calories per minute x minutes; per rep = calories / reps
Calorie estimates from population-average MET values, with individual variation of twenty percent or more. Burpees are a high-impact, high-intensity movement that loads the wrists, shoulders, knees and lower back — build up gradually and consult a health professional before starting if you have joint problems or a cardiovascular condition.
For a 75 kg person, roughly 0.10 to 0.16 kcal depending on pace — so a hundred burpees is around 50-60 kcal, not the several hundred often claimed. The training effect is real; the calorie figure is modest.
Because faster cadence removes the micro-recovery between reps and keeps the heart rate elevated, raising the MET value. The same hundred reps done in five minutes costs more than the same hundred spread over fifteen.
A little. Vigorous interval work produces an excess post-exercise oxygen consumption of perhaps six to fifteen percent of the session cost — real, but far smaller than popular claims and not included here.