Ice Skating Calories Burned Calculator

Calories burned ice skating is the energy your legs and core use to push, glide, balance and turn on the ice. It depends mostly on your weight, how long you are moving, and how fast or hard you skate. A slow lap with a friend and a speed skating race are very different workloads.

What Ice Skating Calorie Estimates Measure

The result counts all the energy you use on the ice, including what your body would burn at rest anyway, so it is a gross figure. It does not read your heart rate or count your laps. It only knows the time and the type of skating you enter.

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 compares an activity with sitting at rest, so 7 METs means about seven times the energy of sitting. Each skating value comes from the 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities, a big research list of energy costs for adults aged 19 to 59¹.

How This Calculator Computes Your Result

Select your age group, type your weight in pounds or kilograms, pick a type of skating, and add your time. The calculator switches pounds to kilograms, picks the MET for your skating type, and multiplies. Each skating result is rounded to the nearest 5 kcal, and the MET is shown to one decimal.

Besides the total, you see calories per hour and per 30 minutes, and a table of all five skating types at your weight.

Not sure how fast you went? Enter your average speed from a watch or app. At 9 mph (about 14.5 km/h) or less, the tool picks easy skating. Above that, it picks fast skating. This split is the compendium's own¹.

Skating time only (optional). The default counts your whole session. At a public skate, though, you may spend a lot of time standing at the boards, helping a child, or waiting while the ice is resurfaced. Switch to this mode, enter the minutes you were moving, and the result is labeled "active time only". Breaks are left out, not given a lower value.

The compendium has no separate figure skating entry, so this calculator uses its ice dancing value for a figure skating program¹. Roller skating is not covered here.

Skaters under 18 get no result, since youth values are not the same as adult ones. Skaters aged 60 and over get a note, since the Older Adult Compendium has no ice skating value².

What Your Result Means

What you see is the energy your skate used, not a target to hit. This is what a 70 kg (154 lb) skater burns on the ice:

The numbers assume you skated for the whole time shown. A heavier skater burns more at the same pace. The easy and fast values are compendium estimates rather than direct measurements¹.

What Changes Your Burn on the Ice

Moving time at a public skate. A two-hour public session can hold much less skating than its length suggests, once you take out lacing up, standing at the boards, and the break for the ice to be resurfaced. Counting only your moving minutes gives a more realistic number.

Speed. The compendium value rises from 5.5 METs for easy skating to 9.0 for fast skating, and racing reaches 13.8¹. At the same weight and time, fast skating burns about 64 percent more than easy skating, so choose the option that matches your real pace.

Technique. Most of the energy a skater uses never turns into speed. In a study of eight elite speed skaters, gross skating efficiency was 15.8 percent, meaning only about one sixth of the energy they used became forward power, and the rest was released as heat³. That was in elite athletes, so the calculator does not try to adjust for skill.

Practice versus a full program in figure skating. A figure skating practice has coaching, rest, and repeated attempts at the same jump. A full program run is nonstop. In a study of 11 competitive figure skaters, mostly teenagers, every skater reached their own maximum heart rate and maximum oxygen uptake during an on-ice free skate of at least 4 minutes⁴. About 74 percent of the energy came from aerobic (oxygen-using) pathways⁴. The 14.0 MET value fits those hard minutes, not a whole practice. For a practice, use skating time only or the general value.

Ice Skating Compared With Hockey, Skiing and Walking

Calories for one continuous hour of each activity, using 2024 Adult Compendium values¹:

An hour of general skating burns nearly twice as much as an hour of steady walking. It sits a little below general ice hockey and above moderate downhill skiing, a value that counts only time spent skiing, not time on the lift¹. Racing on skates sits near the top, alongside skate-style cross-country skiing¹.