How Many Calories Can You Burn With Jumping Jacks
Some people can perform about 100 jacks in two minutes. Count them as you go so you know how many you do in two minutes. Assuming you do 100 in about two minutes and weigh 150 pounds, you’d burn 19 calories.
What Number of Jumping Jacks Is Considered a Legit Workout?
Is it 100? 200? 1,000? Or does it all add up to jack squat?
The first time I ever did a jumping jack was as a warm-up exercise during T-ball practice. At the time, the jumping jack seemed like a fun way to hop around, and a welcome change of pace from all of the stretching that I loathed. Besides, we never had to do more than 10 jumping jacks at a time, so it’s not like we were exhausted when each round reached its conclusion.
Fast forward to middle school gym class, where I was also required to do daily jumping jacks before we moved on to basketball, flag football, running or whatever else was on the P.E. teacher’s agenda that day. We still, though, never progressed beyond 10 jumping jacks at a time, and I vividly recall wondering what the point of them even was.
That’s where I left jumping jacks until roughly 2002, when I needed to come up with active-rest exercises for my personal training clients to engage in when they were between lifts. Rightfully thinking that push-ups brought too much intensity, I suggested jumping jacks, and I was as surprised as anyone to learn that they were more than sufficiently taxing for the task at hand.
But short training bursts aside, if I really wanted to push it to the limit with respect to jumping jacks and make them my preferred brand of post-lifting cardio, how many would I have to do to burn a significant number of calories — 100? 200? 1,000?
How would you figure out such a thing?
The Compendium of Physical Activities is what the designers of cardiovascular training equipment consult when they’re searching for formulas to apply to the settings of treadmills, stepmills, rowers, ellipticals and so forth. Far from being limited to established exercises, the Compendium applies numeric values of training rigor to everything from gardening (watering your lawn has a score of 1.5) to sex (vigorous sex registers at a surprisingly low 2.8), and even to participation in religious services (praising with dancing scores a astonishingly high 5.0).
So where do jumping jacks land? An 8.0, which I’m going to throw a flag on because vigorous kettlebell training was awarded an identical score, and vigorous rowing and stepmilling registered only slightly higher at 8.5 and 9.0 respectively. Either the folks at the Compendium are way off, or I’ve been doing jumping jacks all wrong for a great many years.
Anyway, where do fitness estimators place jumping jacks in terms of their caloric burn? One respectable estimator places the number between 8 and 16 calories per minute depending upon your weight and the intensity of your movement. Frankly, that’s a strikingly wide range, and being the conservative estimator that I am, I’m going to affix a burned-calorie value of nine calories per minute to our formula simply to keep us from wildly overestimating the number of calories you’ve burned.
If we assume that a normal person takes two seconds to complete a full jumping jack — arms and legs out, then arms and legs together — that’s 30 jumping jacks per minute and nine calories burned, or about 0.3 calories per jack.
So, how much jumping of jacks is required to incinerate 100 calories via this hastily spawned, only somewhat reliable formula that I made up 12 seconds ago? Somewhere between 333 and 334.
That’s a lot of jack jumping.
It’s definitely a whole lot of flailing arm movements.
You’d better believe it.
In the hidden track “Lyrical Exercise” from his critically acclaimed album The Blueprint, Jay Z claimed to “get jacks jumpin’, 36 sets.” Well, 36 sets of 10 jumping jacks is about what it will take for you to meet the target of 100 calories burned, and it sounds like one of the most boring workouts in the world. This is because jumping jacks are one of the most mind-numbing exercises you can do for more than 30 seconds. There’s no focus required, nor is there any mental or visual stimulation along the way. Most people are likely to give up out of sheer boredom long before reaching the 100-calorie mark.
If you want my advice, set aside the jumping jacks and grab either a true jump rope or a ropeless jump rope instead. You’ll work similar muscles, you’ll have a lot more fun and you can pretend you’re some badass fictional fighter like Creed as opposed to an elementary school T-ball player.
Ian Douglass
Ian Douglass is a volunteer firefighter, lackadaisical Concept2 rower and SkiErger and is the worst masters swimming All-American in recorded history. He also helps professional wrestlers publish their autobiographies, assists businesspeople with the writing of coherent thoughts and has overhyped degrees from Michigan and Northwestern.
How Many Calories Can You Burn With Jumping Jacks?
Jumping jacks are great exercises because they are simple and offer a wealth of benefits. By doing them regularly, you can tone your muscles, boost your heart health, and burn calories.
Jumping jacks are simple yet powerful. With this exercise, you can burn calories, tone muscles, and boost heart health. Intensity matters since vigorous jacks torch more calories. Calculate your burn using METs or try online calculators.
Jumping jacks are great exercises because they are simple and offer a wealth of benefits. By doing them regularly, you can tone your muscles and boost your heart health. You can do them anywhere too, since they require only your body weight. The calories burned in jumping jack exercises can be fairly high too, if you do them vigorously or over an extended time.
The Calories Burned in Jumping Jack Exercises Depends on Intensity
The more vigorously you perform jumping jacks, the higher your calorie burn. For example, if you are 120 pounds , intense jumping jacks can burn eight calories per minute and as many as 16 calories if you weigh 250 pounds. If you do them at a more moderate pace in the same timeframe, you decrease the calorie burn.
To increase the calories you burn, you can either do a small number of jumping jacks fast or do a high number at a slower pace. Calculating your metabolic equivalents per minute can help you figure out your calorie burn. Moderate exercises, including slower jumping jacks, can burn 3 to 6 METs in a minute. Meanwhile, vigorous exercises, including intense jumping jacks, can burn 8 to 14 METs.
Estimate the METs of your jacks, and multiply the number by how much you weigh in kilograms. Divide the answer by 200. If you weigh 200 pounds and have a jumping jacks MET of 5, that is about 90.7 kgs weight and gives you a burn rate of 2.2 calories per minute.
Alternatively, you can use an online calculator such as the one by MyFitnessPal to estimate how much you’re burning with vigorous jacks. If you weigh 150 pounds and perform the exercise for 10 minutes, your total calories burned in jumping jack exercises is about 94 calories.
How Many Calories Are Burned in 100 Jumping Jacks?
Some people can perform about 100 jacks in two minutes. Count them as you go so you know how many you do in two minutes. Assuming you do 100 in about two minutes and weigh 150 pounds, you’d burn 19 calories.
- If you weigh 120 pounds: About 15 calories
- If you weigh 175 pounds: About 22 calories
- If you weigh 200 pounds: About 25 calories
- If you weigh 225 pounds: About 28 calories
- If you weigh 250 pounds: About 31 calories
Otherwise, count how long it takes you to do 100 jacks, and use that number instead of two minutes.
General Factors Affecting Calories Burned in a Jumping Jack
The number of calories you burn doing any exercise depends on your weight, the intensity of the exercise, and how long you exercise. If you perform jumping jacks at a moderate pace for one hour and weigh about 155 pounds, you could burn 240 to 300 calories.
It is important to track your progress in ways other than caloric burn. One great way is through ZOZOFIT’s 3D body scanning app. The scans show how your body changes over time and can help with your goals, whether they are to lose inches, tone your body, or something else. You can even calculate your body fat percentage so that you are tracking your body composition more closely.
Tracking Progress With Your Calories Burned in Jumping Jack Exercises
Tracking progress when you exercise often helps with motivation and can increase the calories burned in jumping jack exercises. After your workouts, you can track your progress with the ZOZOFIT app . Get access to full 3D body scans in two minutes or less, and analyze changes to your body’s shape using our ColorMetric feature , side-by-side scan comparison functionality, and even calculate your body fat percentage over time.
You can try out either our one month or three month subscription plan and you’ll even receive a 7-day free trial to get you started today!
Jumping jacks are great exercises because they are simple and offer a wealth of benefits. By doing them regularly, you can tone your muscles, boost your heart health, and burn calories.
Jumping jacks are simple yet powerful. With this exercise, you can burn calories, tone muscles, and boost heart health. Intensity matters since vigorous jacks torch more calories. Calculate your burn using METs or try online calculators.
