Imagine that you are a car. Crank it up and you’re burning fuel and if you drive it down the road, you’re burning even more fuel. Stomp on the gas and you’re burning the most fuel. In order to keep it on the road, you have to fill up at the gas pump or charge it at home.
It’s the same way with calories, fueling our bodies and keeping us going. A simple painting job, with a paint roller and a paintbrush, can burn up to 282 calories per hour and even more if you’re doing a more strenuous paint job.
When you’re burning fuel, in the form of calories, and you run out, your body turns to other sources of energy, primarily your fat cells. This is how you lose weight, by not replacing the calories that you burn, or at least you don’t replace them at the same rate as you burn them.
Using our calculator, a surprisingly efficient and very convenient calorie-burning number cruncher, you can determine the number of calories you’re burning while you paint. It’s a very simple algorithm that isn’t difficult to memorize or use and we can start with just about anything.
Calories burned Painting Calculator
How Many Calories Do You Burn Painting a Deck?
To determine how many calories you burn painting a deck, you need to know the formula, which is the MET score for the given activity—painting a deck—multiplied by your weight in kilograms, multiplied by 3.5. The result is divided by 200 like so: (MET x kg x 3.5) ÷ 200.
Painting, whether you are on the deck or painting a wall, uses the same MET number of 3.3. So, let’s say that you have two people that are painting and one weighs 108lbs and the other weighs 212lbs. In kilograms, that will be 49kg and 96.2kg.
Once you plug in the numbers, you get the respective results of 2.83 and 5.56 calories burned per minute. So the 108lb person will burn 170 calories per hour, while the 212lb person will burn 334 calories per hour.
How Many Calories Do You Burn Painting the Exterior of Your Home?
According to the MET (Metabolic Equivalent) activity scale, painting the exterior of your house carries the same MET score as painting the deck does. However, you can also add in the standing and ladder climbing aspects, which would add an additional 3.0 MET. In other words, you could burn 450 calories per hour.
One thing about the MET is that it gives you the number for the activity but it’s not as if you hover around while you’re engaging in the activity of painting. You’re also climbing up and down ladders, carrying paint, and doing a lot of reaching over your head for extended periods.
If you want to zero in on the exact number of calories that you are burning, you should factor these in as well.
How Many Calories Are Burned by Painting for Three Hours?
If you are burning 282 calories per hour from painting, and lump in the additional 100 or so calories per hour burned from hauling paint, using the ladder, and squatting, laying down, stretching, and standing, you can easily burn over 1,100 calories in three hours of painting.
Industrial painting pays an even heavier price and you can easily push past 2,000 calories per hour doing spray jobs and working in the heat. Also, there’s always a drastic difference between a very lightweight person doing the work and a much heavier person.
The heavier person naturally burns more calories simply from the fact that they are carrying around a heavier frame, lifting heavier arms, walking with heavier legs. And their heart beats faster as it supplies blood to a larger network of muscle, bone, and sinew.
Does Painting Even Count as Exercise?
Painting can be a lot more strenuous than you realize and it absolutely counts as a form of exercise. Industrial painters that work in major manufacturing jobs, such as shipyards, burn so many calories in a day that it’s difficult for them to build muscle in the gym. Their protein intake simply can’t make up for the day’s loss.
There are a lot of activities that take place during a paint job as well, including lugging heavy paint buckets and thinner buckets, the actual paint job itself, and a lot of squatting, standing, and leaning. Also, as aforementioned, you’re burning a pretty significant number of calories in a three-hour period.
Final Thoughts
Now that you understand the number of calories you can burn while painting, feel free to use our calculator that you can find on the internet and determine the number of calories that you will burn for any given activity. You’ll be surprised how many are categorized and how much you can learn.
