How to Calculate Calories Burned While Rucking
The following calculator takes into account your weight, your pack weight, your average speed while rucking (or running…if you’re into that sort of thing), the average incline or grade, and what kind of terrain you’re rucking on. The result…how many calories you burn while rucking!
One thing you might be asking is “how am I supposed to calculate the average incline grade?”. To do this, the first thing you’ll need to know is the elevation change of your ruck, hike or walk. Divide this by the distance of your ruck, hike, or walk, using the same units as the elevation change (i.e., feet or meters), then multiply by 100. Okay…but how might you see the elevation change?
If you use Google Maps or Apple Maps (or probably any other mapping app that takes into account walking), you can actually see the grade change.
Google Map of a walk/hike between two points
As you can see above, this map shows a 404’ increase and a 20’ decrease in elevation over the course of the 1.1-mile hike. So…there’s a 164-foot increase in elevation. And, since 1 mile is equal to 5,280 feet (and 1.1 miles is 5,808 feet), I would divide 164 by 5,808 and multiply the result by 100, which equals 2.82%.
Hope that helps!
