Football Calories Burned Calculator

Calories burned playing football is the energy your body uses to sprint, block, tackle, and recover between plays. It depends mostly on your weight, how long you play, and what kind of football it is. This page is for American football. Soccer has its own calories burned calculator on this site.

What Football Calorie Estimates Measure

The result is the total energy you use while playing, including what your body would burn at rest anyway, so it is a gross figure. It does not read your heart rate, your position, or how many plays you were in for.

The Formula

Calories (kcal) = MET x body weight (kg) x time (hours)

1 MET = about 1 kcal per kg of body weight per hour

A MET shows how many times more energy an activity takes than sitting at rest. The values come from the 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities, a large list of energy costs for adults aged 19 to 59, where "football" means American football and association football is listed as soccer¹.

How This Calculator Computes Your Result

Pick your age group, enter your weight in pounds or kilograms, choose the type of football, and enter your time in hours and minutes. The tool converts pounds to kilograms, looks up the MET for your choice, and multiplies. Results are rounded to the nearest 5 kcal, and the MET appears with one decimal.

The light flag and playing catch values are estimates in the compendium, not direct measurements¹. Results include total calories, calories per hour and per 30 minutes, and all four football options side by side at your weight. No result appears for players under 18, because youth values differ from adult ones. Players 60 and over see a note, as the Older Adult Compendium does not list football.

Split my session (optional). In tackle football many players play only offense or only defense, so much of a game is spent on the sideline. This helper takes your playing minutes and your long breaks (halftime, sideline time, water breaks) and counts only the playing part, labeled "active time only". Do not subtract the gaps between plays. Huddles and those short pauses are already part of the football values.

What Your Result Means

Think of the number as the energy that football session used, not a target. For a 70 kg (154 lb) adult, the football numbers look like this:

A 90 kg (198 lb) player burns about 720 kcal in an hour of tackle or flag football, because there is more body to move with every step.

What Changes Your Burn in Football

Short plays, long pauses. Football is a few seconds of all-out effort, then a walk back and a huddle. In a study of an under-19 European championship, plays lasted 5.3 seconds on average, and the time between plays averaged about 47 to 56 seconds, depending on the team's offensive style². Most of a football game is recovery time between those bursts.

Your position. In college games tracked with GPS, wide receivers and defensive backs covered more total distance, more high-speed running and more sprint distance than other position groups³. In preseason practices, linemen covered about 2,570 m against 3,530 m for other players and reached lower peak heart rates (194 vs 201 beats per minute)⁴. The authors suggest linemen do more static pushing and holding work instead⁴. No study we found turned these differences into calories by position, so the calculator does not ask for one.

Snaps played. A starter and a backup can both "play a game" and burn very different amounts. The split helper counts only your time on the field.

What Studies Measured on the Field

Football research tends to track movement and heart rate rather than calories. In the GPS study, 33 college players wore trackers through 12 regular season games, giving 295 player game files³. In the heat study, 49 college players wore heart rate monitors and GPS across 9 preseason practices that lasted 142 minutes on average, at a wet bulb globe temperature of about 29 C⁴. Neither reported calories, so the compendium value remains the best available estimate for a calorie calculator.

Heat and pads. In a lab study, 10 linemen walked and lifted boxes in 33 C heat. In the full uniform, with helmet and shoulder pads, their core temperature rose faster than in the same uniform without them (0.042 vs 0.034 C per minute)⁵. It did not measure calories, so pads add nothing to your result here. The point is safety: full gear in hot preseason weather adds heat strain⁵.

Football Compared With Rugby, Soccer, Basketball and Weight Lifting

Calories for an hour of football and other sports, from 2024 Adult Compendium values¹:

Competitive soccer and rugby union sit a little above competitive football, and a basketball game ties with it. An hour of vigorous weight lifting is listed well below an hour of football games¹.