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About this tool
Calories for a bouldering or roped climbing session, counting wall time separately from belaying and rest.
The Rock Climbing Calorie Calculator estimates a bouldering or roped session by separating minutes actually on the wall from minutes spent belaying, brushing and resting. Wall time uses the rock climbing codes from the Compendium of Physical Activities — 5.8 MET for low-to-moderate difficulty, 7.5 MET for hard ascent — converted with kcal/min = MET x 3.5 x kg / 200, and rest is priced at 2.0 MET. It also reports the pure lifting work, mass times gravity times height, as an independent physical cross-check.
Open Rock Climbing Calorie Calculator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter the values you already know.
Fine-tune the options to match your scenario.
Read the result and use it in your planning or reporting.
Rest is charged at 2.0 MET instead of full climbing intensity.
Uses the measured 7.5 MET figure, not the discredited 11.0 that older tools still use.
Reports the mechanical work of the vertical gain alongside the MET estimate.
About 536 kcal per hour of continuous hard lead climbing for a 68 kg climber at 7.5 MET, and roughly 414 kcal per hour on easier top-rope terrain at 5.8 MET. A real two-hour session with 48 minutes on the wall comes to around 600 kcal once belay time is counted at 2.0 MET.
Per minute on the wall, usually yes — limit bouldering is rated around 8.0 MET against 7.5 for hard roped climbing. Per session it is often less, because bouldering burns are short and the rest between them is long, so total wall time is smaller.
The pre-2011 Compendium listed rock climbing at 11.0 MET. Direct measurement led the 2011 revision to cut it to 7.5 MET for hard ascent, so any tool still using the old figure overstates climbing by about 47%.
Less than people expect. Raising a 68 kg climber 120 vertical metres is about 80 kJ of mechanical work, roughly 77 kcal at 25% muscular efficiency — around 13% of a 600 kcal session. The rest goes on grip, body tension and holding position.
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