How Many Calories Do You Burn Walking With Weight? A New Formula May Finally Reveal the Answer.

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“HOW MANY CALORIES do I burn walking with weight?” is a question that fills my inbox.

People message me details like their body weight, the weight in their backpack, and their pace and ask if I can give them the exact number of calories they burned, like I’m a human Apple Watch.

I get it. We want to measure a workout’s impact so we know how effective it was and can make comparisons with other workouts. Not to mention, it’s satisfying to see a number at the end confirming, yes, we worked our butt off.

Calories burned is an important question for both lifespan and healthspan. Burning more energy across the day vastly improves your metabolic health. Better metabolic health helps you avoid crippling diseases like type 2 diabetes, which in turn helps you live longer and better.

We often think that type 2 diabetes is caused entirely by what you eat. But for most people, a lack of physical activity is likely more at fault. As Dr. Trevor Kashey says, “Type 2 diabetes isn’t so much a carbs problem as it is a couch problem.”

Research shows that people free from type 2 diabetes live more than 6 years longer than those who have it. What’s more, they also live better moment to moment, aren’t shackled to medications, and have better mental health and physical function, helping them enjoy life more.

Yet it’s never been easy to determine calorie burn from walking with weight. In fact, calculating calorie burn from any activity is not easy—even the number on your fitness tracker is a semi-educated but definitely wrong guess about any activity. Calculating calorie burn while walking with weight is extra challenging because:

• It’s a rather understudied form of exercise.

• It mixes strength and cardio.

• The nature of it comes with many variables that impact calorie burn: for example, the weight in your pack, the terrain you’re walking on, and how fast and far you’re walking.

• It has a muscular effect, leading you to burn more fat and build or maintain muscle. As a result, your improved body composition will likely have longer-term calorie-burning effects.

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Scientists have come up with all sorts of calculations to make reasonable guesses about caloric burn, but they aren’t perfect. For example, a popular equation called the Pandolf equation, which scientists have used for years, was recently found to underestimate calorie burn.

And then, in 2024, David Looney, a mathematical physiologist who conducts research with the Department of Defense and US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine (USARIEM), finally gave us a great study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise on the number of calories burned from walking with weight. So I called Looney to learn more about his work.

Marching with weight in a pack is the most important physical act of soldiers, so the military has been examining it for years.

Looney took a group of soldiers and had them walk with weight in a pack on a treadmill using different loads and at different speeds. Their packs had a weight equal to using 22, 44, or 66 percent of their body weight at paces ranging from 1 mile an hour to roughly 4.5 miles an hour.

As they walked, they had a device strapped to their mouth to measure their oxygen uptake and carbon dioxide production. By measuring the amount of oxygen the participants consumed, the scientists could determine their calorie burn.

To prove that the formula was not isolated to the one lab, Looney then “tested it out and validated it against other data that was collected in different soldiers and different populations, just to prove this wasn’t a one-trick pony.”

It’s important to note that Looney’s study included more women than previous studies. Military research has traditionally focused predominantly on men, even though more women are now entering the military. Not to mention the fact that far more civilian women are walking with weight to improve their health and fitness. What this means is that the calorie burn figures from those old studies may not apply to all people. In the study, Looney noted: “The current study represents a step in the right direction for female representation in exercise sciences.”

His model is likely the best existing estimate of the calories we burn walking with weight. The graphs below show how many calories you burn while walking with weight.

But if you want to use a calculator to know your exact numbers, click here.

To understand the graphs (or use the online calculator), you’ll have to do a little math. I, too, hate math. But don’t worry, we’ve made it easy. You’ll just need to know what 10, 20, and 30 percent of your body weight is.

We’re using weights equal to a percentage of your body weight instead of an absolute poundage for a good reason: If we were to give you an absolute figure in pounds, your calorie burn figure would be wrong. For example, walking with 20 pounds (an absolute poundage) would impact a 120-pound person differently than a 240-pound person. Using a load equal to a percentage of your body weight corrects for differences between the size of people and gives us a more accurate calculation.

Here’s how to calculate your figures:

• For 10 percent: Take your scale weight and multiply it by 0.10. There’s your poundage.

• For 20 percent: Take your scale weight and multiply it by 0.20. There’s your poundage.

• For 30 percent: Take your scale weight and multiply it by 0.30. There’s your poundage.

So, for example, if I weighed 170 pounds and wanted to figure out what 20 percent of my body weight is, I’d take 170 and multiply it by 0.20 to get 34 pounds.

Of course, the weight you use when you walk with weight won’t be exact. For example, if you weigh 170 pounds and use a 20-pound weight, it will be about 12 percent of your body weight. But you can get “close enough” to 10, 20, and 30 percent. And if you use the online calculator, you can plug in your numbers to get your exact figures.

Each graph gives three body weights: 120, 170, and 220 pounds. That gives us a range of body sizes. You probably don’t weigh exactly one of those weights, but you can make a reasonable estimation based on the position of the graph lines.

Each graph gives us three different speeds, ranging from 2 to 4 miles an hour and also shows calorie burn for 1 hour of walking with weight.

The big takeaways: You burn more calories the faster and heavier you ruck. “But the effective load is nonlinear,” explained Looney. This means you burn increasingly more calories with more weight. That’s because it’s less ergonomic, or comfortable, to carry heavier weights. “More work comes from just holding that weight up against gravity versus propelling it forward,” said Looney. More work = more calories burned.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should try to load yourself down with a maximum weight when you walk. We’ll cover more on finding the ideal weight and trade-offs between using lighter and heavier weights later. This is also why, as Looney’s study showed, using backpacks burns slightly more calories than using weight vests, which are more ergonomic.

Excerpted from the book WALK WITH WEIGHT by Michael Easter. Copyright © 2026 by Michael Easter. From Harvest, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

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