According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), you can burn around 7 calories per minute doing pushups. But, this number can vary widely depending on your body weight, the number of pushups you do per minute, and the types of challenges you add to your workouts. Our pushup calories burned calculator is designed to consider these crucial factors to provide you with the most accurate results.
Pushups usually do not help people torch as many calories as other forms of exercises do. But they are one of the most-challenging and most-effective exercises for building upper body and core strength. If you are on a specific type of diet where you need to keep a track of your calories, our push up calories burned calculator can be of great help.
Read on to find out how it works and what you can do to burn more calories doing pushups.
📖 Related Article: If you are trying to build an enviable upper body, you may be interested to learn how you can gain muscles without eating a lot.
Our Push-Up Calories Burned Calculator
Factors that affect the number of calories burned from doing pushups
Weight
The heavier you are, the more calories you can burn doing pushups (and almost all other forms of resistance and strength training exercises). Thats because your arms (in fact your who;e body) will have to support a greater mass against gravity. They will need more energy to work with this extra weight, and you will end up burning more calories.
If you are not a really heavy person but if you want to burn more calories, you may wear WODMASTER 20LB weight vest or something similar. Weigh yourself after wearing the vest and put your exact weight in our pushup calories burned calculator to find out how many calories you can expect to burn per minute.
Sex
It is easier for men to burn more calories than women, even when they weigh the same, are in the same age group, and do the same amount and intensity of exercises. Thats because men usually have more lean muscles and a higher metabolism rate than women.
Age
As you age, your body tends to lose muscles. It starts storing fat instead. Fat slows down the burning of calories. Our pushup calories burned calculator is designed to consider this factor while calculating the results for you.
Intensity
It is pretty obvious that the number of calories burned per minute directly depends on how many pushups you do during that time. So, make sure you choose the exact intensity level in our puship calories buned calculator. Remember that your intensity may vary every minute. You may do more pushups for the first minute of your exercise. To ge exact result, you may do multiple calculations; one for each minute.
💡 Quick Tip: If you are a beginner and do not have enough upper body strength, you may do incline pushups using a workout bench. Incline pushups are also great for people suffering from elbow and wrist injuries. We recommend the REP Fitness FB-3000 Flat Bench because it is made of high-quality 11-gauge stainless steel, has grooved feet, and a thick grippy padding so you can exercise safely and comfortably in your home.
REP Fitness FB-3000 Flat Bench
How can you burn more calories than what our pushup calories burned calculator has predicted
You can do that by making your pushups more and more challenging. There are a number of ways to do this.
Use pushup handles
They were originally invented to help people with wrist pain or wrist injuries exercise more comfortably. They keep your wrist, shoulders, and arms in one single line, which helps take pressure off the wrists.
Using pushup handles and bars, however, requires additional strength, balance, and energy. Stationary ones such as the Juperbsky Push-Up Stands challenge you by providing you with a greater range of motion. Your chest has to travel a few extra inches down and this will obviously require a lot more energy than conventional pushups. The rotating pushup bars such as Perfect Fitness Perfect Pushup + Ab Carver Pro force you to work harder and engage your balancing muscles to keep yourself stable while exercising.
💡 Quick Tip: Want to make your pushups as challenging as possible? Products like AERLANG Push Up Board can help you with that. These boards usually have multiple positions and angles where you can insert the handles to target different muscle groups and the same muscle groups but in a different way.
AERLANG Push Up Board
Try decline pushups
Thanks to gravity, the higher you raise your legs, the harder the pushups become. The hardest versions such as handstand pushups can help you burn maximum possible calories but they are not meant for everyone. Using an exercise bench or a plyometric box is a safer option to raise your lower body and force your upper body to work harder.
Slow down
Yes, you heard it right. Moving faster helps you do more reps per minute but going slow helps put your muscles under additional tension. This tension helps burn more calories. There is no fixed formula on how slow you can go. Start with taking 3 seconds to go down, hold there for three seconds, and then take 3 seconds to return to the starting position. Once you are comfortable with this, you can change the resting duration to 5 seconds. You can also change the movement duration to 5 seconds.
📖 Related Article: If you are working hard on building your upper body strength, you might be interested to learn why it is not wise to work your chest more than three times a week.
Wrap up
Did you like our pushup calories burned calculator? Do you have any suggestions on how we can improve it? Share your experience by leaving a comment below or sending an email. Keep reading our blog for more such helpful guides.
