BMR Calculator With Instructions

BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate is an estimate of your caloric needs.

It’s based on fairly standard scientific math, and is a decent estimate of your base calorie expenditure. The most basic calculation determines how many calories your body would burn laying down, just pumping blood and oxygen around your still quiet body. That’s not terribly useful for most of us here though. We exercise. Sometimes a lot. Like a lot-a-lot for some of us.

To also accommodate the caloric needs estimate for active people, this BMR calculator has a few generalized dropdown selections for activity levels. These go from no, to light, moderate, high, and extreme sports training and workout levels. In general, you could consider it like this:

  • No – you don’t work out
  • Light – 1 to 3 workouts about 30 minutes or less per week
  • Moderate – 3 to 5 workouts about 50 minutes or less per week
  • High – workout pretty much every day for over an hour
  • Extreme – workout every day over 90 minutes regularly > HR Zone 3

Using the BMR Calculator

If you are honest about all of this, and there’s no reason to not be, this BMR calculator will give you your Basal or resting rate of caloric expenditure, as well as an estimated daily caloric need to adequately support your sport, workout, training or other activity level. How do you use this information?

Are you able to track your daily caloric intake, or the calories in the food and drink you consume in a day? There are apps for that, or you can go old-school and use a notebook to track your calories. Take note of the number of calories this BMR Calculator suggests. If you are having difficulty recovering from your workout and you discover that you are not eating as much as you should, you can fix that. If you determine you are eating way too much for your level of activity, then you can also fix that.

Remember to eat good healthy food first. That should be the foundation of your own nutrition plan. If you are wanting to lose weight, or burn fat, some people experience great success by subtracting a few hundred calories from their activity level recommended calories and eating accordingly. Some people can lose a pound or so per week using that method. We’ll talk about that in a later post.