Good News: Sex Burns Calories, So You Can Keep Doing It

Have you ever thought “man, if only I had an accurate calorie burn count for sex I could spend an hour porking (sorry) instead of running on this treadmill like a chump?” Well, someone has your sexy back, and the news is pretty damn good! Basically, we’re all Sweating to the Oldies in the bedroom — in a very sensual way. So, exactly like Sweating to the Oldies. (Except Richard Simmons isn’t there to be embarrass you, which would probably burn even more calories because you’d be straining to do your groove thang while he screams ‘I believe in you! I believe in you! You’ve got to love the weight before you lose the weight!’)

According to Antony D. Karelis, a professor of exercise science at the University of Quebec at Montreal who led a study on calories burned during humping (sorry), there are myths that sex burns at least 100 calories per session. The reality is pretty damn close — men, on average, burn 4 calories per minute and women burn 3. With the average sex session lasting about 25 minutes, that’s 75 calories and whole fuckton (legit fuck-tual measurement) of fun.

To find this out, the study recruited 21 young heterosexual couples in committed relationships and asked them to run on a treadmill for 30 minutes while taking their vitals. Then, they sent them home with special armbands that would track their movements — both unsexy and very sexy — for a month. In the end, the researchers concluded that sex qualified as “moderate exercise” and burned four calories per minute for men and three per minute for women — equivalent, according to various estimates, of playing doubles tennis or walking uphill. The jogging was much more strenuous with men burning about 9 calories per minute and women about 7.

Of course, the most important bit of data is that ninety-eight percent of the study participants reported that sex felt more fun than jogging. The other two percent were Jane Fonda in the 80s.