The short answer
A 70 kg person lifting at a steady full-body pace burns roughly 175 calories in 30 minutes (MET 5). That is less than most cardio, but lifting builds muscle that raises your resting metabolism every day and adds an afterburn that cardio does not. The chart and calculator below break the session burn down by your exact weight, intensity, and time.
Weightlifting has a reputation it does not fully deserve: people assume it does not burn many calories. The truth is more interesting. The calories you burn during a lifting session are modest compared with running or cycling, but lifting changes your body in ways that keep paying out long after you rack the last set. To use the numbers honestly, you need both halves of the picture.
The session math runs on the MET (metabolic equivalent). Each style of lifting has a MET value from the 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities, and the formula is simple: calories = MET x your weight in kilograms x hours. Light or general lifting sits around 3.5 MET, a steady full-body session around 5 MET, vigorous lifting around 6 MET, and circuit-style training around 7.5 MET. We did that math for every common weight and intensity below.
How many calories does weightlifting burn?
Pick the row for your session length and the column for your weight. Light is general or technique work (around 3.5 MET), moderate is a steady full-body session with normal rest (around 5 MET), and vigorous is heavy, fast-paced lifting (around 6 MET). Circuit training, which keeps your heart rate high with minimal rest, climbs to around 7.5 MET and lands closer to cardio territory.
Why your weight matters
Lifting still moves your body mass between and during sets, so the heavier you are, the more energy a session costs. That is why every row in the table rises as you move right across the weight columns. A 100 kg lifter burns noticeably more than a 55 kg lifter doing the identical workout, simply because there is more mass involved in every rep, walk to the rack, and recovery between sets. This is the same reason two people on the same program see different numbers.
Why intensity and rest periods change the number
This is where lifting differs from steady cardio. Two people can lift the same total weight in an hour and burn very different amounts, because rest periods are part of the equation. Long rests between heavy singles keep your average MET low, even though each set is brutal. Short rests, supersets, and circuits keep your heart rate elevated and push the average MET up toward 7.5. If raw calorie burn during the session is your goal, compress your rest. If strength is the goal, longer rest is correct, and you simply accept a lower in-session burn.
What about the afterburn (EPOC)?
Here is the part the MET chart cannot show. After a hard lifting session, your body keeps spending extra energy to recover: repairing muscle fibers, restoring oxygen, and clearing metabolic byproducts. This is called EPOC, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, often nicknamed the afterburn. For intense lifting it can add roughly 6 to 15 percent on top of your session calories. That is real, but it is modest, and you should be skeptical of anyone selling lifting on afterburn alone.
The far bigger effect is structural. Muscle is metabolically active tissue: the more you carry, the more calories you burn at rest, every single day, even while sitting still. Cardio does not build muscle the way resistance training does. So while a run beats a lift on the calories burned in the moment, lifting slowly raises the baseline you burn around the clock. Over months, that compounding baseline often matters more than any single session's number.
Calories burned vs calories eaten
Knowing you burned 200 calories in a session is only half the picture, and for lifters the other half is mostly about protein. Muscle does not appear from training alone; it is built from the protein you eat, in the right overall calorie balance. Most evidence points to roughly 1.6 to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day when you are training to grow. Eat too little protein and a hard session repairs less muscle than it could; eat back every calorie without a plan and a fat-loss goal stalls. The useful move is to connect the session to your intake for the day, which is exactly the gap a coach fills.
Log your lifts without the math
Reading a chart is one thing. Tracking every session and hitting your protein target day after day is where most people give up. With CalAlly you say "I did 45 minutes of upper body" and it logs the session, estimates the burn, and folds it into your daily numbers. The built in AI nutrition coach then tells you how much protein and how many calories to eat to match your training, so the work you put in actually turns into muscle. See what CalAlly is, the best calorie tracker for lifters, or our best calorie tracker apps roundup.
