How many calories does BJJ burn?

An hour of BJJ burns roughly 320 to 1,080 kcal, depending on your weight and how hard you go. For a 75 kg person, that's about 400 kcal an hour of drilling, 775 kcal an hour of hard rolling, and about 525 kcal for a typical 60-minute class.

Want to see what all that mat time is actually doing for your game? Track your rolls and what's working with JitsAI, the BJJ training app.

Estimates from the 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities · Updated 7 October 2026

Your 60 minutes on the mat

at 75 kg

Your weight

kg stone and pounds

Weight in kilogramskg

Estimates: MET × your weight in kg × hours, from the 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities. Your real number can be higher or lower. Saved on this device only.

BJJ calories burned per hour, by body weight

Kilocalories (kcal) for 60 minutes. Find your weight across the top. Drilling and rolling are the Compendium's two martial-arts entries; the class row adds them up.

2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities: code 15425, martial arts at a slower pace, practice (5.3 METs), and code 15430, martial arts at a moderate pace, which names jujitsu and judo (10.3 METs). Rests between rounds are counted at the drilling rate.

Drilling vs rolling: why the number swings

Rolling burns about twice what drilling does. The Compendium puts sparring-pace martial arts, jiu-jitsu included, at 10.3 METs: about ten times what you burn sitting still. Technique practice is 5.3 METs.

Most of the swing in your real number comes from three things:

• How much of the class is live. A technique-heavy class with lots of standing and watching burns far less than an open mat where you roll round after round.
• Rest between rounds. Sitting out a round on the wall drops you to close to resting. Our tables count rests at the drilling rate, so if you sit out a lot, you'll burn less.
• How hard you roll. A flow roll with a friend is closer to drilling. A hard round against someone your size is the top of the range, or beyond it.

If you're planning how to split your week between drilling, positional sparring and live rounds, a BJJ training plan helps you see where the hard minutes go.

Calories burned in a 60 or 90-minute BJJ class

A class is a mix. We've taken a usual shape: warm-up and technique first, live rolling at the end.

So at 75 kg, a 60-minute class is about 525 kcal and a 90-minute class about 815 kcal. Add or take away about 65 kcal for every 10 minutes of drilling you swap for rolling, or the other way round.

Gi vs no-gi calories

Nobody has measured calories in gi and no-gi side by side, so there's no reliable answer. The closest evidence is a small study of simulated matches (Coswig, Bartel and Del Vecchio, Archives of Budo, 2018), which found heart rate and blood lactate were similar in gi and no-gi. No-gi often moves faster with fewer pauses; the gi brings more grip fighting. Use the same numbers for both.

How many calories does a BJJ competition burn?

Less than you'd think, because matches are short. Under IBJJF rules, adult matches run from 5 minutes at white belt to 10 at black belt. Three 6-minute matches add up to 18 minutes of the hardest rolling you'll do.

At 75 kg that's about 230 kcal for the matches and 365 kcal with the warm-up. Competition is tiring because of the intensity and the nerves, not the total calories. This page isn't advice on making weight.

What the studies measured

Two studies measured BJJ directly, and both back up the idea that live rolling is hard work:

• In a regular training session, trained athletes sparring five 6-minute rounds averaged 164 beats a minute, about 85% of their maximum heart rate (Øvretveit, International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 2018).
• Ten advanced grapplers doing 6 minutes of no-gi sparring reached an estimated 44.2 mL of oxygen per kg per minute by the end (Pessôa Filho and colleagues, PLoS One, 2021). That's about 12.6 METs, higher than the Compendium's 10.3, which is why a hard round can burn more than our table and a light one less.

Why your watch might say something different

Fitness watches often get calories wrong, and many people find they read high. In a Stanford study of seven wrist-worn devices, none estimated calories to within 20% (Shcherbina and colleagues, Journal of Personalized Medicine, 2017). Grappling is harder still: your wrist is gripped, your heart rate jumps with adrenaline and holding positions, and there's no steady stride to count. Treat any number, ours included, as a rough guide.

How we worked it out

Every number here uses the same sum: MET × body weight in kg × hours.

A MET is how hard an activity is compared with sitting still. One MET is roughly 1 kcal per kg of body weight per hour. So rolling, at 10.3 METs, for a 75 kg person for one hour is 10.3 × 75 × 1 = 772.5, which we round to 775 kcal.

The MET values come from the Herrmann SD, Willis EA, Ainsworth BE and colleagues, 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities: a third update of the energy costs of human activities, Journal of Sport and Health Science, 2024, the standard reference researchers use. They're averages for adults, so your real number can be higher or lower. They also include the 1 MET you'd burn anyway sitting on the sofa, so the extra from an hour of training is about 75 kcal less than the table shows at 75 kg.

Does BJJ help you lose weight?

It can help, because it burns a lot for an hour and plenty of people find it easier to keep turning up to than a gym. But weight loss still comes down to eating a bit less than you burn, week after week. Two habits make the difference:

• Log the session, but don't eat it all back. Because the estimates can run high, many people eat back only part of their exercise calories and watch their weekly weight trend.
• Keep protein high. When you eat less, protein and hard training are what help you keep muscle, so more of what you lose is fat.

For how BJJ stacks up against the gym and running, see weights vs cardio vs BJJ: calories in 60 minutes.

How to log BJJ in ParrotPal

Tell ParrotPal what you did, the way you'd say it to a training partner: “an hour of jiu-jitsu, mostly drilling, 20 minutes rolling”. You can also add it by hand as a martial arts activity with how long it lasted, and workouts recorded in Apple Health can come in too. Your training then counts towards your LeanShield™ score, which rates the habits linked to protecting muscle.

Eating for BJJ training: protein and recovery

• Protein every day, not just after class. A review of 49 trials (Morton and colleagues, 2018, British Journal of Sports Medicine) found that, with strength training, extra muscle from more protein levelled off at around 1.6 g per kg of body weight a day. Our protein calculator works yours out. In practice, aim for 25 to 30 g a meal.
• Eat something before you train. A normal meal 2 to 3 hours before class, or a small snack nearer the time, makes hard rounds easier than training on empty.
• Refuel after. A meal with protein and some carbohydrate after training helps you recover for the next session. High-protein snacks and high-protein foods make it simple.
• Drink. You sweat a lot in a gi. Have water during and after class.

On Mounjaro, Wegovy or another GLP-1? Smaller meals make protein harder to reach, and the scale shows how much you lose, not what. Our guide to muscle loss on Mounjaro covers the habits that help. If you feel weak, dizzy, very tired or unwell when training, stop, and talk to your prescriber, GP or pharmacist. If it feels urgent, call NHS 111.

Fuel the next session

Work out your daily protein number, then see how BJJ compares with weights and running.

Work out my protein Weights vs cardio vs BJJ Free LeanShield score

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