TempoLife › Features › Video explainers › what-a-met-is
What a MET is, and why every calorie chart uses it
The viewer can read any MET table and convert it to calories for their own body weight.
There are no videos here yet, and this page does not pretend otherwise. TempoLife has published no explainer videos, so nothing on this surface is watchable and there is no player anywhere on it. What is published is the script library: the full storyboard for each explainer, ready to shoot.
The hook
“Every calories-burned chart on the internet comes from one table.”
First four seconds. It states the surprise outright rather than promising one, because a promise is a reason to scroll and a surprise is a reason to stay.
Why this topic is worth 75 seconds
MET is the whole vocabulary that lets a watch, a treadmill and an app agree on how hard something was. Naming it once is what makes the rest of the fitness section make sense.
One MET is the cost of sitting still, roughly one kilocalorie per kilogram per hour. Every other activity is a multiplier on that.
The reason this beats “calories burned” for a beginner is that MET does not lie about your weight. Two people doing the same jog at 8 MET are burning very different totals, and MET makes that obvious.
MET is the hidden unit behind every activity-calorie figure anyone has ever looked up, and almost nobody knows the term. Explaining it converts a mysterious number into something the viewer can compute and sanity-check.
It also explains, in one line, why heavier people burn more for the same activity — which defuses a lot of confusion about why two people on the same run get different figures from their watches.
The storyboard
| Time | On screen | Voiceover | Visual |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0:00–0:05 | One table, every chart | Every calories-burned chart on the internet comes from one table. | Rapid montage of lookalike calorie charts. |
| 0:05–0:20 | One MET = sitting still | A MET is a multiple of your resting energy use. One MET is roughly what you burn sitting still. An eight-MET activity costs about eight times that, minute for minute. | A dial with 1 at rest, climbing as the person stands, walks, runs. |
| 0:20–0:40 | The conversion | To turn that into calories you need your body weight, and one line of arithmetic: MET times three and a half, times your weight in kilograms, divided by two hundred, gives calories per minute. | The ACSM equation types out and holds on screen. |
| 0:40–0:58 | Why weight is in the equation | That is why a heavier person burns more doing exactly the same thing. There is more mass to move, and the equation prices it. Any chart printing one figure for everybody has quietly assumed a body weight. | Two people, same activity, two different per-minute figures. |
| 0:58–1:10 | What it cannot know | What the table does not know is your effort on the day, your technique, or the hill. It is an average, and it is a good one — but a watch reading and a table reading will differ, often by a tenth or more. | Watch face and paper table side by side, disagreeing. |
| 1:10–1:15 | Every exercise, priced | MET values for every movement are on TempoLife. | End card: /exercise. |
Read it as a script
The voiceover column, in order, is the whole piece:
Every calories-burned chart on the internet comes from one table.
A MET is a multiple of your resting energy use. One MET is roughly what you burn sitting still. An eight-MET activity costs about eight times that, minute for minute.
To turn that into calories you need your body weight, and one line of arithmetic: MET times three and a half, times your weight in kilograms, divided by two hundred, gives calories per minute.
That is why a heavier person burns more doing exactly the same thing. There is more mass to move, and the equation prices it. Any chart printing one figure for everybody has quietly assumed a body weight.
What the table does not know is your effort on the day, your technique, or the hill. It is an average, and it is a good one — but a watch reading and a table reading will differ, often by a tenth or more.
MET values for every movement are on TempoLife.
Every number this script shows
The MET dial and the conversion beat, at 75 kg.
| What appears on screen | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Walking Slow | 2.8 MET · 3.7 kcal/min | data/site/exercises.php (2011 Compendium of Physical Activities) |
| Walking Brisk | 4.3 MET · 5.6 kcal/min | data/site/exercises.php (2011 Compendium of Physical Activities) |
| Cycling Moderate | 8.0 MET · 10.5 kcal/min | data/site/exercises.php (2011 Compendium of Physical Activities) |
| Running Easy | 8.3 MET · 10.9 kcal/min | data/site/exercises.php (2011 Compendium of Physical Activities) |
| Jump Rope | 11.8 MET · 15.5 kcal/min | data/site/exercises.php (2011 Compendium of Physical Activities) |
| Same 8 MET activity at 65 kg vs 95 kg | 9.1 vs 13.3 kcal/min | Computed on this page |
Nothing in the storyboard above quotes a figure directly. The beats refer to numbers and this table supplies them, so a script written months ago cannot go stale against its own data.
Production notes
- The equation must be legible at phone size. Test it on a 5-inch screen before locking the edit.
- The two-people beat needs visibly different body sizes, shot respectfully and without comment.
- Name the source of MET values on screen: the Compendium of Physical Activities.
Closing card
Every exercise, with its MET, at tempolife.app/exercise
General information, not medical advice. These scripts describe averages across populations; nothing in them is a diagnosis or a treatment recommendation.
Source: Figures computed from the TempoLife food database (USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy) and the 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities · checked 2026-09-02
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