How Many Calories Do You Burn by Jumping Jacks?

Jumping jacks are a full body exercise that helps improve cardiovascular endurance and strengthen muscles. They also burn a significant number of calories.

They’re easy to perform and might seem basic, but that doesn't mean you should underestimate them. You can burn a surprising number of calories by doing jumping jacks, and they’re especially useful when used as part of an overall fitness routine.

How Many Calories Do Jumping Jacks Burn?

Jumping jacks calories burnt. (Image via Freepik)

If you’re doing jumping jacks for a minute, you burn about ten calories. However, this number can be higher or lower depending on your body type, specifically basal metabolic rate (BMR). BMR is determined by a few different things, including your height, weight, and sex.

Assuming you burn about ten calories a minute doing jumping jacks, it will take you about ten minutes to burn 100 calories. However, the average person can do about 50 jumping jacks a minute (or 0.83 jumping jacks per second), which means that after ten minutes, you would have done about 500 jumping jacks.

To figure out how many calories you burn by doing jumping jacks, you can check the metabolic equivalent (MET) to get a good estimate. If you do jumping jacks with high intensity for 30 minutes, the workout will have a MET rating of 8.

How many calories you burn while performing jumping jacks depends on: the type of exercise, your weight, and how long you spend doing it. If you do jumping jacks at a rate of one MET per minute, you will burn 8 Kcal/kg of bodyweight per hour.

Are Jumping Jacks an Effective Way to Lose Weight?

Jumping jacks for weight loss. (Image via Unsplash/ Rodrigo Dos Qenm)

Wondering if jumping jacks can help you lose weight? Bodyweight can be a good indicator of physical fitness, as muscle weighs more than fat.

If you do jumping jacks for 30 minutes twice a day, it should take about six days to lose one pound of fat, but in that time, you will build some muscle that will also weigh more on the scale.

So, you might lose a pound of fat in less than a week by trying different variations of jumping jacks for weight loss, but your weight won't change much. The best measure of progress is how fit you feel or how far you can run before getting tired.

Benefits of Jumping Jacks

Some of the benefits of the exercise are as follows:

1) Jumping jacks are a fun way to strengthen the muscles, especially the muscles of the lower body and upper body, the back, shoulder, and core. They also improve stamina to achieve fitness goals and balance by increasing the heart rate.

2) Jumping jacks strengthen the bones, tone the muscles, and relieve stress. They also stimulate the brain to release hormones that make you feel happy, such as serotonin and adrenalin.

While jumping jacks are good body exercises, too many repetitions can lead to stress and chronic pain. The intensity of the exercise can also have a negative impact on the body, especially if you have low bone density.

Which Muscles Do Jumping Jacks Work?

When you do jumping jacks, the primary muscles used are in the lower body, specifically:

glutes
quadriceps
hamstrings
other muscles in the legs

These muscles are among the largest in the body.

Although jumping jacks are primarily a lower body exercise, they also engage the upper body. Because of that, they are one of the most effective exercises you can do for a full body workout.

Start jumping jacks today. (Image via Unsplash/ Christopher Campbell)

If you have never tried jumping jacks, give them a try. Start slow and build up to more advanced versions.

While they are not high intensity exercises, they can help increase your endurance and heart rate. Remember that jumping jacks burn calories in every way possible, so do not discount them as small and unimportant. They're simple enough to do anywhere at any time and therefore shouldn't be ignored.