How Many Calories Does Sex Burn

Can Sex Replace Cardio in Your Workout Regime? We Investigate

Relationship Dec 21, 2023 0 24 Add to Reading List

One common and, honestly, effective piece of dieting advice is to eat foods you enjoy eating. Afterall, a diet is only as good as your adherence to it, so if you don’t happen to love white rice, boiled chicken and broccoli, no problem: eat tuna, lean ground beef, chicken thighs, potatoes, etc. Well, the same advice applies to exercise: if you don’t like to run, hit the exercise bike or the elliptical.

This chain of thought leads us to an inevitable question: what if sex counted as exercise? Afterall, who wouldn’t prefer a vigorous bedroom session to a sweaty erg workout or stairmaster marathon?

And if sex does count as exercise, exactly how much exercise are we talking? What would it compare to?

As it turns out, you’ve got questions and science has answers. We took a look at some of the relevant studies to find out exactly how many calories you can expect to burn during sex, as well as whether or not you should log your bedroom time into your fitness tracker.

How Many Calories Do You Burn During Sex?

As you might expect, there are a lot of variables that go into influencing how vigorous your average love-making session might be, from the age and weight of the participants to the positions used. And, as I hope you’ll allow, there are some tricky ethical and privacy considerations scientists have to face in studying this question that might limit how a study can be conducted.

As the saying goes, though, science must go on, and there have indeed been concerted attempts by scientists and researchers to answer this question. Here’s what they found:

Estimating & Extrapolating: The Montreal Study

One of the most often-cited studies on the “sex as exercise” question was conducted by researchers in Montreal and published in the prestigious PLOS One journal. The methodology was relatively straightforward: a group of young people in romantic relationships were outfitted with calorie-tracking armbands and asked to self-assess their level of pleasure, perceived exertion, and amount of fatigue after engaging in sexual activity. These results were compared to a standard, 30-minute treadmill test administered to each participant.

Once all the results were in, the researchers found a mean intensity of sexual exercise for both men and women. The finding? Men, on average, burned about 4 calories per minute during sex, while women, on average, burned about 3.

In other words, if we extrapolate from their numbers, men can expect to burn about 120 calories in a 30-minute sexual encounter.

Should You Track Your Sex as Exercise?

Now, 120 calories in half an hour isn’t much, but it also isn’t nothing. Should you find a way to track the sex you’re having on your fitness tracking software? Should you factor it into your diet? Unfortunately, probably not.

The subjects in the Montreal study were very young and disproportionately in shape. If you’re still in your 20s, and if you keep in good shape, then their results might apply to you, but they also might not.

Additionally, there’s no real way to map one person’s love-making session onto another’s in any meaningful or accurate way. There’s almost certainly a significant difference in calories burned between various sexual positions, for example (men do a lot more work in the standard missionary position, and a lot less in cow girl), and obviously the duration of activity varies wildly between couples or even between sexual encounters.

The NEJM Study: Exploding the Sex as Exercise Myth

In the same year that the Montreal study was conducted, another study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at obesity and obesity interventions more generally, and examined the feasibility of using sex as exercise in the context of promoting weight loss.

Their findings were, to say the least, discouraging. With an average duration of sexual intercourse of just six minutes, and an average calorie burn of 3.5 calories per minute for men, sex ranked somewhere below a light jog and above sitting on the couch watching television as a calorie-burning activity.

Important Variables to Consider

Okay, now that we’ve given you a whirlwind tour of the scientific findings, it’s time to add some caveats. The above findings are averages, so your mileage is most definitely going to vary.

How much variation should you expect from the average? Well, here are some of the important variables that factor into calculating the caloric burn of sex:

Your age
Your weight
The positions you engage in
The duration of sex

What does this mean? Well, if you did want to use sex as a form of exercise, you can tweak your routine a little to boost the calorie burn. Pick positions that involve more standing than sitting or lying down, and that focus on you doing more of the thrusting work rather than your partner. You can even make it into a game: put on a fitness tracker and try to beat your record every time you and your partner make love. Teamwork makes the dream work, baby!

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