Sex machines

Broadly speaking, exercise is defined as any activity that requires physical effort to help you maintain or improve your overall health. In that sense, sex is certainly exercise!

Sex certainly involves some degree of physical labor, and there's plenty of scientific evidence that sex is good for our health. In addition, sexual activity can reduce stress, improve mental health, lower the risk of heart attack and extend life expectancy.

But how much exercise do we get from sex? Like how much does it raise your heart rate? How many calories will you burn?

A recent paper published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior attempts to answer these questions through a systematic review of the scientific literature. The authors identified 18 studies published between 1956 and 2020 and provided insights.

While 18 studies sounds like a lot, the total number of participants in all the studies was just 349, with 264 men and 85 women. In addition, all of the reviewed studies seem to focus specifically on the physiological requirements of sexual intercourse (penile-vagina).

This is an important context to keep in mind. There is very little data on women and very little data on people of different genders and sexual orientations. In addition, we don't know how different the outcomes are for behaviors other than sexual intercourse (such as solo masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, etc.). Will.

Given this background, we know that:

How many calories does sex Burn

Only two of the 18 studies seem to have assessed this. One group reported an average energy expenditure of 130 calories; However, the study included only eight participants, only one of whom was a woman.

Another study involving 21 heterosexual couples found that men burned an average of 101 calories while women burned an average of 69 calories during intercourse.

So the best answer we can get from this is that a person probably consumes about 100 calories during sex, give or take. But that number obviously varies by sex, and can vary by many other factors, such as the duration of intercourse.

Heterosexuals, on average, said they spent a total of about 20 minutes on intercourse and foreplay, but some spent much less and others much more.