How Many Calories Does Jumping Rope Burn?

Jumping over a rope can offer surprisingly intense workouts. Find out how many calories you burn while jumping rope and how to burn more.

Some rough estimations are that the average person will burn around 197 to 339 calories while jumping rope at a moderate pace for 20 minutes.

Details like your body weight will influence where you are on this range a lot.

For example, a 125-pound (56 kg) person would burn around 197 calories while jumping rope for 20 minutes. On the other end, the 339 calories are the rough estimation for a 215-pound (97 kg) person.

That aside, you can definitely say burning a lot of calories is one of the benefits of jumping rope.

This article will also go over other details that influence your results, more in-depth calorie-burning estimations, and how to make your jump rope workouts more effective in this area.

Biggest factors in calories burned by jumping rope

An unfortunate jump rope fact is that accurately estimating how many calories you will burn is very hard to do. There are many details that influence your actual results.

This can make life harder for people who want to balance their food intake calorie by calorie.

Luckily, you can still make your estimations somewhat more accurate by taking certain details into account.

You can also use these details that influence the number of calories burned while jumping rope to make your workouts more effective in this area.

With that in mind, here are a few of these details:

• Weight: The more weight you have to move with a movement, the more calories you tend to burn. This concept also applies to body weights which means heavier people tend to burn more calories while jumping rope.
• Jump rope speed: You can jump rope at many different speeds. Jumping faster tends to burn more calories per minute of working out.
• Body fat vs muscle mass: Two people of the same body weight can burn slightly different amounts of calories with the same jump rope workout. This is because an amount of muscle mass tends to burn more calories than the same weight in body fat.

Hidden calorie burning from jumping rope

Another detail that makes it harder to predict the results from jumping rope is a thing called afterburn.

This is something where you burn more calories than usual for a certain amount of time (typically not more than 72 hours) even after you stop jumping rope.

Afterburn will not make the biggest difference but small amounts do add up over time.

To get this afterburn effect from jumping rope you have to work out intensely enough. Do make sure your body can safely deal with this intensity.

Next, exercise also influences the levels of a variety of hormones that can in turn influence the number of calories you burn slightly.

As you may expect, these secondary calorie-burning effects from jumping rope are hard to measure and even harder to predict. Because of this, they are typically not included in the estimations.

Chart of rope jumping calorie-burning estimations

The Centers For Disease Control And Prevention simply mentions that jumping rope can burn more than 7 calories per minute (1).

Luckily, you can also make more precise estimations with something called MET values. These are numbers that indicate the intensity of activities and exercises.

In turn, you can use these MET values for activities like jumping rope in the formula below to get calorie-burning estimations for different body weights and time intervals.

Formula: METs x 3.5 x (your body weight in kilograms) / 200 = calories burned per minute

Different sources can vary but in one example, jumping rope gets an MET of 8 for a slow pace, an MET of 10 for a moderate pace, and an MET of 12 for a fast pace (2).

In the table below, you can find estimations for how many calories jumping rope at a moderate pace burns for different people and amounts of time.

Again, you should not take these estimations too precisely. Since the MET formula is oversimplified, your actual results will likely vary.

How many calories do 100 skips burn?

People who have a jump rope with a counter (or really like counting) may wonder how many jump ropes they should do to burn certain amounts of calories and/or what effects their existing workouts have.

A 155-pound (70 kg) person who does about 80 skips per minute will burn around 15 calories per 100 skips.

At that same speed, this comes down to about burning 75 calories when skipping 500 times and 150 calories when doing 1000 jump rope skips.

These rough estimations again don’t take more long-term effects like afterburn into account.

Besides that, knowing that one medium chocolate chip cookie (30 grams) is about 148 calories makes it easier to put amounts of food on these numbers (3).

Ways to burn more calories with jumping rope

As you can conclude from the different MET estimations for different intensities, you can influence how many calories you burn while jumping rope.

This can be helpful for people who want to see more results in a shorter amount of time.

The first way to burn more calories per minute of jumping rope is by going at faster speeds. These more intense movements will require more energy from your body.

You do want to make sure your skill level is up for this. If the rope gets stuck after every few fast jumps, it may be smarter to start with slower speeds first.

Secondly, you can make it so your body has to move more weight.

You can do this by jumping rope with extra weights like a weighted vest but also by building muscle mass with resistance training workouts.

Lastly, if your body can deal with it, you can also consider jumping rope more often or for longer amounts of time.

How long does it take to see results from jumping rope?

All the numbers above may seem impressive but you likely also want to know what this means in terms of secondary effects like weight loss.

Before going into some rough estimations, while jumping rope can help you lose weight, details like what you eat will still influence whether this happens and to what extent.

That aside, you can think up a fictional situation where all the extra calories you burn come from body fat to get a rough idea of what you can expect.

A 185-pound (84 kg) person can burn an extra 873 calories or about 0.25 pounds (0.11 kg) of body fat with three 20-minute jump rope workouts a week.

After implementing this jump rope routine for a month (four weeks), the same person would have burned an extra 3492 calories or about 1 pound (0.45 kg) of body fat.

Again, keep in mind that whether jumping rope burns belly fat or other energy stores also depends a lot on your diet.

Besides that, as this person (and you) lose weight, the same jump rope workout plan will burn fewer calories.

Is jumping rope good for burning calories?

You can definitely say that jumping rope is good for burning calories. Even just consistently jumping rope for 10 minutes a day can make a big difference over time.

Especially if you really pick up the pace and build muscle mass with resistance training workouts.

One potential downside you do want to keep in mind is that jumping rope can be hard on body parts like your ankles, knees, and back. Especially for people who have a few pounds to lose.

If you are sensitive in these areas, certain jump rope alternatives could be better choices even if they burn fewer calories per minute.