Jumping jacks are a classic exercise for a reason. They get your heart pumping and work various upper, core, and lower body muscles. As a result, they can help you burn calories and boost your fitness level. But how many calories do jumping jacks burn exactly? And why does this even matter? If you’re trying to lose weight or improve your fitness, every little bit helps. Understanding how many calories jumping jacks burn can help you track your progress and stay motivated, especially when paired with the best app to track macros. In this article, we’ll answer the question, “How many calories do jumping jacks burn?” Then, we’ll provide tips to maximize calorie burn to reach your goals faster.
Calorie tracking is one of the most effective ways to reach weight loss and fitness goals. At Cal AI, we make calorie tracking easy with our intuitive calorie tracker. Use our tool to understand how many calories jumping jacks burn and learn practical tips to maximize calorie burn for effective weight loss and fitness results.
Jumping jacks activate your entire body by targeting your major muscle groups. This simple exercise consists of various resistance and aerobic workouts, so it’s a great addition to your cardio sessions. This exercise increases your body temperature and blood flow to essential muscles.
Many people use low-impact jumping jacks to warm up their cardiovascular systems. Jumping jacks are a plyometric exercise that strengthens many of your muscles simultaneously. They also help you burn fat and build muscle without using weights. Jumping jacks are an excellent way to ensure good physical health.
Jumping jacks is an easy-to-do workout that can be done everywhere. It engages all the vital organs of your body, including your lungs, heart, and muscles, all at once. This exercise targets primary and secondary muscles.
Primary muscles include:
Also known as gluteus maximus, the glute is your hip’s primary extensor muscle. The gluteus maximus is the outermost and the largest of the other three gluteal muscles. It is a thick and fleshy mass that covers a large area of your hips, giving them a quadrilateral shape.
These are a group of muscles that join your legs to the trunk. Hip flexors enable you to raise your leg or knee to the torso and bend toward the hip.
Quadriceps femoris, quads, or quadriceps extensors comprise a large muscle group consisting of the four major muscles on the thigh’s front. These are the great extensor muscles present in the knee that form a big, fleshy mass. This mass covers some sides and the front part of the femur.The secondary jumping jack muscles worked are:
The abdominal muscles are a pair of parallel straight muscles separated by a midline connective tissue band, also known as the linea alba.
This refers to the three posterior thigh muscles from your knee to the hip. The hamstrings are usually quite susceptible to injuries during sports or workouts, so you must be cautious while jumping jacks.
Jumping jacks also work your shoulder muscles in different areas, including anterior and posterior deltoids. The deltoid muscle makes up the rounded contour of your shoulders. The anterior deltoid consists of clavicular muscle fibers with an insertion point on the clavicle. The posterior deltoid comprises spindle fibers and is associated with bony vertebral projections.Jumping exercises include all these muscles in the plyometric training session.
The number of calories you burn doing jumping jacks can vary based on how long you do them for or how fast you do them, as well as personal factors that affect your metabolism. Jumping jacks might seem essential, but they offer profound benefits, including boosting your cardiovascular system and toning your muscles. They’re a plyometric, total-body move that can also be part of a calisthenics routine.
Since jumping jacks only require your body weight, they’re also a great cardiovascular exercise that you can do anywhere and anytime. In addition to increasing your heart rate and improving muscular strength and endurance, jumping jacks are a fantastic way to burn calories.
The number of calories burned will vary from person to person. According to MyFitnessPal, jumping jacks can burn about eight calories per minute for a person weighing 120 pounds and up to 16 calories per minute for someone weighing 250 pounds.
Several factors determine the number of calories you can burn when doing jumping jacks. April Whitney, an NASM-certified personal trainer and nutrition coach, explains that if it’s calorie burning you’re after, you’ll want to up the intensity.
You can do this in two ways:
Your metabolism also affects how many calories you can burn while jumping jacks. It’s dependent on several factors, including:
Regarding metabolism, the larger the person, the more calories they’ll burn. This is true even at rest.
In general, males burn more calories than females performing the same exercise at the same intensity because they usually have less body fat and more muscle.
The aging process changes many aspects of health, including how many calories you burn. This slowdown is caused by an increase in body fat and a decrease in muscle mass.
To determine the number of calories you can burn during physical activity, exercise physiologists, trainers, and physical therapists often use metabolic equivalents (METs) for accuracy. One MET is the energy it takes to sit quietly. While at rest, you can expect to burn approximately one calorie for every 2.2 pounds per hour.
Moderate activity usually comes in around 3 to 6 METs, while vigorous activities burn more than 6 METs. Jumping jacks can range between 8 and 14 METs, depending on intensity. You can find countless MET tables, like this one, online.
To determine how many calories you’ll burn per minute:
Your result will be the number of calories you burn per minute. You can also plug this information into an online fitness calculator, like the one offered at Cal AI.
Cardiovascular exercise is an essential component of any weight loss program. You can use METs as a general rule of thumb for the number of calories burned per pound for weight loss. For example, if you weigh 150 pounds and perform five minutes of moderate to vigorous-intensity jumping jacks, you can expect to burn around 47 calories. According to the Mayo Clinic, you must burn about 3,500 calories to lose one pound of fat.
You can generally do this by taking in 500 fewer calories daily and increasing your physical activity. You’ll need to kick up the intensity to burn 500 calories with jumping jacks alone. Even then, you’ll still need to do many jumping jacks.
Instead, consider making jumping jacks part of a more extensive routine by:
In addition to burning calories, jumping jacks can help increase your aerobic capacity or cardiovascular fitness.
The movement involved in jumping jacks is perfect for strengthening muscles in your lower body, including your:
The standard jumping jack is a great calorie burner, but if you want to add some variety to your workouts, there are several ways you can make the move more challenging or target different areas of your body.
To increase the intensity, Whitney recommends adding a resistance band just above the knees or at the ankles, which activates the glutes. You can also do a full-body burpee after every five jumping jacks.
If you aren’t ready for a full jumping jack, try lower-intensity modifications. Eric Sampsell, PT, ATC, CMP, Cert. MDT, a physical therapist for The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics, recommends going through the move slowly with a step instead of a jump. “This can be beneficial in allowing the tendons and joints to acclimate to these new moves and prepare it for a higher-level version later,” he explained.
Another alternative is to remove the arm movement from the exercise and focus on the legs, or vice versa, to master a part of the exercise before trying the full jumping jack.
While jumping jacks are relatively safe for most fitness levels, there are some things to be aware of before you add them to your workout routine. If you have any lower body injuries or are prone to chronic pain in your knees or ankles, check with your healthcare provider or physical therapist about best practices.
Land softly and stick to a carpeted or padded surface. If you feel pain or discomfort while performing jumping jacks, stop the exercise and talk to an expert about alternatives.
Exercise is good for your body and soul. Too much can have adverse consequences that may lead to:
Some of the warning signs of compulsive exercise include:
To shed pounds, you must burn more calories than you consume. A caloric deficit of 500 calories daily will help you lose about one pound weekly. You can achieve this through exercise, nutrition, or a combination. Incorporating jumping jacks into your aerobic routine can help you reach your daily caloric deficit goal.
According to the Harvard Medical School, a 155-pound person burns about 100 calories in 10 minutes of doing jumping jacks. This number increases to about 120 calories for a 185-pound person and decreases to 90 calories for a 125-pound person. Jumping jacks are an effective way to burn calories and incorporate aerobic exercise into your routine.
According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, setting specific, possible, and forgiving goals can help maintain weight loss results. One realistic option is incorporating jumping jacks into a daily workout routine combining cardio exercise and strength training.
Breaking up jumping jacks into smaller sessions throughout the day or performing them in bursts during interval training can help make the full-body exercise more accessible and attainable.
Beginners should consider starting with a daily set of 10 jumping jacks in between other exercises, while more advanced exercisers can aim for a daily set of 25 jumping jacks. Add jumping jacks to an existing exercise routine to tone, tighten, and torch calories, and watch those excess pounds slip away!
Jumping jacks can burn a decent number of calories. The exact number depends on several factors, like weight and workout intensity. According to Harvard Health Publications, a 125-pound person burns about 240 calories performing jumping jacks for 30 minutes at a moderate pace.
A 155-pound person burns about 298 calories, while a 185-pound person burns approximately 355 calories.
Of course, the more you weigh, the more calories you’ll burn doing jumping jacks. The ACE also notes that a 200-pound person burns 52 calories for 10 minutes of moderate jumping jacks or 120 calories for just 10 minutes of vigorous jacks. Extend those calisthenics workouts to a full hour, and you’re looking at 600-plus calories burned in a vigorous exercise or a still very respectable 240 to 300-calorie burn for a moderate workout. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
If you’re working out for weight loss or maintenance — usually the goal when calorie counts come up — then you must beware of the pitfall of taking those jumping jack workouts as carte blanche to eat anything you like. If you’re not careful, you might just find that you’ve eaten back all the burned calories and then some.
This gets right at the sometimes misunderstood core of weight loss: It’s not just about burning lots of calories — it’s about burning more calories than you consume, also known as establishing a calorie deficit. Need more proof that your diet matters?
An impressive body of research from the National Weight Control Registry shows that most people who lose weight and keep it off do so with a combination of exercise and diet. That doesn’t mean you have to starve yourself. Instead, focus on eating a nutrient-rich diet.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommendations for healthy eating are a great place to start. They recommend eating:
What if you’re doing jumping jacks not for weight loss but to stay healthy? Regular cardiovascular exercise—like jumping jacks—is a key component of the HHS physical activity guidelines. They recommend that to stay healthy. You should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity.
You can break that workout time into multiple sessions and sprinkle them throughout the week however you like—or go for the gold and try to get double that exercise (300 minutes of moderate or 150 minutes of vigorous cardio) every week for even more health benefits.
And, of course, if you love doing jumping jacks, you can put in all that exercise time with one activity. But even the biggest jumping jacks fan can tire of them after a few hours. If you’re ready for a change, consider mixing in other calisthenics exercises that do not need equipment to change things up.
Just a few of your many options include:
You can count to a certain number of repetitions for each exercise (for example, do 20 jumping jacks, then 20 mountain climbers, then 20 burpees, and so on), or set a timer for intervals — they can be as short as 30 seconds — and move on to a new exercise each time the timer goes off.
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