It’s easy to overlook jumping jacks when looking for exercises to incorporate into your workout routine, but jumping jacks are an excellent cardio exercise that makes you work your whole body. In addition, since they don’t require any extra equipment or a ton of space, you can do jumping jacks pretty much anytime, anywhere.
You can burn up to 100 calories for every ten minutes of doing jumping jacks. The exact amount of calories will vary depending on your gender, current weight, and level of fitness.
Today, we’ll be sharing with you all the facts you might want to know about the calories you can burn while doing jumping jacks.
How Many Calories Can You Burn Doing Jumping Jacks?
As we’ve mentioned, the average person burns about 10 calories for every minute of jumping jacks they do. However, this number can be higher or lower depending on a few factors, the main one being your basal metabolic rate (BMR).
Your BMR is a measurement of how many calories your body burns every day to sustain its most basic functions. A person’s BMR is determined by a few different things, including a person’s height, weight, and biological sex.
If you want a relatively easy way of determining how many calories you’ll burn from doing jumping jacks, you can use metabolic equivalents of task (METs). Simply put, a MET is a measurement of how much oxygen your body uses while at rest; the more oxygen your body uses, the more calories you will burn.
Sitting or lying down without doing anything else uses one MET, while any sort of physical activity will use more. Jumping jacks usually use about 7.7 METs.
The formula of using METs to calculate how many calories you’ll burn during physical activity is as follows:
- Take the number of MTEs an exercise uses (in this case, 7,7) and multiply that number by 3.5.
- Take the resulting number and multiply it by your weight in kilograms.
- Divide that number by 200, and you’ll have an approximation of how many calories you’ll burn per minute of exercising.
How Many Jumping Jacks Does It Take to Burn 100 Calories
Again, the exact number is going to change depending on your own physical characteristics, but we can certainly give you an estimation of how many jumping jacks this will take. Assuming you’re burning about 10 calories a minute doing jumping jacks, it would therefore take you 10 minutes to burn 100 calories.
As for how many jumping jacks it would actually take to burn 100 calories, the average person can do about 50 jumping jacks a minute (or 0.83 jumping jacks per second). Therefore, after 10 minutes you would have done about 500 jumping jacks.
How Many Calories Does 50 Jumping Jacks Burn?
As we’ve established in the previous section, 50 jumping jacks will burn about 10 calories, since this is approximately how many jumping jacks the average person is able to do in a minute.
How Many Calories Does 500 Jumping Jacks Burn?
Going off of what we just stated, 500 jumping jacks will burn about 100 calories. This can vary considerably, however.
In general, the heavier you are, the more calories you’ll burn during exercise. For example, the 100 calories per 10 minutes estimate typically applies to those who weigh around 165 pounds. On the other hand, if you only weighed 125 pounds, you would only burn about 73 calories in 10 minutes, and if you weighed 225 pounds you would burn about 138 calories in 10 minutes.
How Many Calories Does 20 Minutes of Jumping Jacks Burn?
Again, assuming that you’re of about average weight and performing an average of 50 jumping jacks every minute, you would burn about 200 calories after 20 minutes of jumping jacks.
Can I Lose Weight by Doing Jumping Jacks Every Day?
Absolutely! As we’ve stated, jumping jacks are an excellent cardio exercise that works your whole body. You probably won’t lose as much weight as you’d like through jumping jacks alone, but jumping jacks are a great addition to any daily workout routine.
To lose weight, you need to be burning more calories than you’re consuming each day. This sort of thing isn’t really possible to achieve through exercise alone; you’ll also need to make modifications to your diet.
In addition, you need to make sure that you’re burning enough calories during each of your workouts to actually make a difference. The exact number of calories you should burn will obviously change depending on your personal needs, but in general, it’s a good idea to aim for about 400-500 calories burned during each workout.
To burn 400 calories, you’d have to do an average of 40 straight minutes of jumping jacks. For most people, this type of workout isn’t really feasible to do, nor would it be very fun.
