When calorie counting, most people focus on total calories, overlooking other critical nuances like active calories. Total calories refer to the total number of calories you burn daily, while active calories measure the number of calories you burn during physical activity. A clear understanding of active calories vs total calories can help you make more informed choices about your health and fitness. This article will discuss the differences between active and total calories and how this knowledge can help you achieve your health goals.
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Active and total calories are two measurements that help you understand how your body expends energy. As the name implies, active calories (or active calorie burn) are the calories burned during physical activity.
All forms of exercises, whether light (ex. walking) or heavy (ex. resistance training), that increase your heart rate fall into this category. Total calories, on the other hand, include active calories plus the calories your body burns at rest to maintain essential functions (basal metabolic rate).
Almost any physical activity that gets your heart rate up will burn active calories.
Some examples include:
Total calories matter because they help you understand overall energy expenditure. Whether you’re trying to lose, maintain, or gain weight, you must be aware of the active versus total calories “debate.” These two metrics are critical in determining whether you meet your daily burning calorie goals.
Active and total calories differ in what they measure, how they are calculated, and how they can help you reach your fitness goals. Understanding how active and total calories complement each other can help you track your energy expenditure more precisely.
Active calories, sometimes called exercise calories, are the calories you burn during physical activity. Total calories, on the other hand, include both active calories and the calories you burn at rest. Your body constantly burns these resting calories to maintain bodily functions like breathing and digestion, even when you’re not moving.
Total calories better represent your overall metabolism, while active calories help assess the impact of exercise on weight loss and fitness.
Active and total calories can help you reach your fitness goals, especially if you’re trying to lose weight, gain muscle, or improve your performance. Tracking these metrics can help you understand how your diet and exercise habits influence your metabolism and energy balance. For example, if you’re trying to lose weight, both active and total calories can help you track your progress and adjust as needed. Active calories can help you understand how much to eat to recover from workouts, while total calories will help you gauge how many calories you burn daily to inform your weight loss diet.
As previously stated, smartwatches and equipment can help you monitor your currently active and total calorie expenditures throughout the day. Tracking only the time spent working out will not give you the precise numbers to track your calories. As a dietitian, I want to help you use innovative technology and tools to monitor your calories daily!
Almost all smartphone companies now offer smartwatches that easily pair with your phone. These smartwatches, most notably the Apple Watch, are equipped with heart rate monitors and sensors to track your daily calorie expenditure. The best part of these watches is that they can provide real-time data on the active calories you burn during workouts! After the day ends, you can check your smartphone for close estimates of the total and active calories you have expended.
Many fitness and health applications allow you to record your daily caloric intake from food while tracking your current active and total calorie burn. Regularly monitoring my caloric intake and checking if I’m expending more energy than I consume can help me track my fitness goals.
Since diet plays a massive role in my active and total calorie burn, gaining insights into how much and what foods I eat is vital. As a dietitian, I understand how challenging it can be to familiarize myself with the amounts of calories different food items have.
Thankfully, online nutrition calculators allow me to record the food items I have consumed and provide information regarding their caloric and macronutrient profiles.
When you track an activity on your Apple Watch and then go to the Fitness app to see your data, it often gives two different answers to the question, “How many calories did I burn?” Those are active and total calories, and you may notice that both fields sometimes show the same number; other times, they are two different numbers.
You’re probably familiar with the idea that exercise burns calories. We might say, for example, that a half-hour jog burns 300 calories. (The exact number will depend on factors like how big and fast you run, but let’s use this as an example.) Jogging burns calories, but you still would have burned some calories if I had stayed home watching TV—just not as many. Remember, keeping your body alive and functioning takes a few calories.
For example, if I weigh 200 pounds, I’ll burn around 46 calories in half an hour of watching TV. (Yes, there is data on this.) Meanwhile, half an hour of easy-paced running burns 363 calories. That means I burned 363 total calories, but only 317 of those are on top of what I would have burned while staying home. Apple tries to communicate this with the “active” and “total” calorie labels. To give a real-life example, I went for an easy three-mile jog one day, taking about 38 minutes. Apple reports that I burned 351 total calories, of which 294 were active calories. (That means I think I would have burned 57 calories if I hadn’t been running during that time.)
It takes a lot of energy to keep a human body alive! You must keep your heart beating, lungs breathing, and brain thinking. Each cell of your body has to do lots of microscopic maintenance work to stay alive.
Think about how a dead body is different from one that’s alive. It stops defending itself against germs and fungi and begins to fall apart. That doesn’t happen while you’re alive because your body constantly works hard to repair damage, attack invaders, and more. And all of that takes energy, which we measure as calories. For example, a 200-pound, 6’ man would be expected to burn 1,930 calories daily as their basal metabolic rate; a 150-pound, 5’5” woman would burn 1,426. That is before counting any exercise or daily activities like walking around the house and brushing my teeth.
This number, which represents the bare minimum needed to stay alive, is called my basal metabolic rate, or BMR. The resting metabolic rate, or RMR, is closely related, which includes the energy we use to digest our food. RMR plus the activities we do—such as exercise—equals our total calorie burn for the day. If you’re curious about your RMR, the Apple Health app includes a number for Resting Energy, which estimates your RMR. Take that number with a grain of salt, though. It’s calculated from your age, sex, and weight, so it’s just an estimate of what a person your size would be expected to burn.
I see different numbers for active and total calories for activities that I logged directly with the Apple Watch fitness app. You know the one—it’s the greenish-yellow icon with the little running person. But my active and total calories are the same for workouts logged through other apps. Strength training from Whoop? 58 calories active, 58 total. A five-mile run with Strava? 695 active, 695 total. My morning walk picked up by Oura? 68 active, 68 total. That’s not because my basal metabolism ceased to activate; these apps only communicate a single number to Apple as calorie burn. Since the Apple Fitness app doesn’t know the split, it reports the same number in both spots.
Trick question! Calorie burn, measured by wearables (any wearables, not just the Apple Watch), isn’t always reliable. So the most correct answer is neither. But if I find it helpful to track calorie burn from my wearable, maybe to keep an eye on how much more I should eat if it’s been a high-activity day, the active calories are most helpful. To return to the example of my three-mile jog, that jog burned 294 calories over what I would have burned if I hadn’t gone on that jog. So, if I want to eat enough to make up for the extra burn, I’d eat the active number of 294 calories, not the total number of 351.
Navigating your active and total calorie burn can help you set realistic body composition goals. Once you have mastered tracking and monitoring my caloric consumption and expenditure, focusing on my diet and physical activity, I will experience accurate results.
Of course, suppose I can be more precise with my tracking, such as learning the “art” of counting macronutrients or applying this tracking to a more specific endeavor (such as counting macros for CrossFit or another sport/fitness endeavor).
In that case, I will achieve even better results. However, getting active and total calorie burn sorted is a very commendable goal for beginners. It can be a good starting point for those who want to take more control of their fitness and dietary journeys.
When it comes to increasing calorie burn, high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, truly is your best friend. This is because HIIT simultaneously “hits” all the individual avenues for calorie burn. It burns many calories during your workout–typically 30 minutes long–and has been shown to burn more calories for up to 38 hours after your workout.
I know. This is also known as “the afterburn effect,” it occurs due to the energy your body requires to return to homeostasis following an intense workout.
When you perform an extremely intense workout (aka HIIT), your body uses energy to repair your muscles, re-oxygenate your system, bring your body temperature back to normal, and replenish energy sources such as ATP.
All of this results in an increased calorie burn even after your workout is finished, and this is something you may not get after, say, a light jogging or walking session. Many HIIT sessions also use bodyweight movements and weights, which means you’re building muscle… and muscle burns more calories at rest than fat! This, again, also means you’ll be burning more calories even when you’re not working out.
In addition, diet is key to losing fat, and an ultra-clean diet will make it easier to maintain your calorie limits/goals. This recent blog breaks down exactly what you should and should not be eating regarding shredding, so check it out.
Another way to increase total calorie burn outside of working out is to increase your daily steps. This could mean always taking the stairs instead of the elevator, going for a walk during lunchtime, parking farther away in the parking lot, or generally walking more throughout your days. This may seem insignificant, but trust me, it adds up over the week!
This idea may not significantly increase your burn, but every little bit counts. Research shows that spicy foods, like peppers, can temporarily boost metabolism. Similarly, other research has also shown protein can burn more calories due to the energy required to digest it.
Again, I wouldn’t rely on these for significant burns, but both can assist in feeling full and are part of eating healthy regardless! At the end of the day, remember that your Active calories compromise those you’ve burned during activity. In contrast, your total calories are your active calories combined with the rest of your calorie burn.
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