This backpacking calculator will provide the total number of daily calories you burn for a given number of minutes spent on a variety of trail conditions, your pack weight, as well as number of hours spent sleeping. It also factors in your non-sleeping, non-trail hiking minutes spent, based on your inputted minutes, and calculates calories burned doing normal camp related activities, such as setting up your tent, cooking food, eating, etc.
The trail conditions this calculator uses include moderate, leisurely, flat land hiking; more fast paced flat hiking; easy to moderately sloped fast paced uphill hiking; moderately sloped, moderately paced up and downhill hiking; moderate to steep slope fast paced uphill hiking; and up and downhill steeply sloped moderate paced hiking.
Basal Energy Equations and METs References
Like my other calculators, I use separate basal energy equations for men and women hikers, derived from the medical/nutrition scientific literature.
Further, I use MET multipliers found in the Compendium of Physical Activities. These multipliers tell me how many times over a hiker’s basal metabolic rate a particular trail condition will cost, in terms of calories. For example, a MET of 3, which is assigned by the Compendium to walking on flat land, at a moderate pace, causes 3 times the amount of calories burned, compared to lying perfectly still in bed, in a perfectly relaxed fashion.
Men’s Thru-Hiking Total Daily Calories Burned
Women’s Thru-Hiking Total Daily Calories Burned
Other Hiking Calculators
If you like this trail condition format of my calculator I also have the following calculators available:
Trail Conditions Specific Thru-Hiking Calories Burned on the Trail Calculator
Simple Thru-Hiking Calories Burned Calculator
light pack, day hiking calories burned on the trail calculator
light pack, day hiking total daily energy needs calculator
Further Reading
Check out my Hiking Nutrition page, for more articles on the topic. I’ve based my articles off the International Society of Sports Nutrition’s review papers, which I’ve painstakingly read to give hikers ideas on how sports nutrition applies to them.