Apple Watch Now Has a Pickleball Setting, So How Many Calories Do Picklers Burn?

One thing I love about pickleball is when I play four or five times per week, I can eat pretty much anything I want. That's certainly nice to be able to do as a 58 year old woman! But I was curious as to how many calories I burn when I play, so I did a little bit of research.

According to a two-year-old Reddit thread, a few players tracked their calories burned with a smart watch. Apparently, there was no setting for pickleball at the time so they used badminton or other sport. However, in 2020 Apple did add Pickleball as a setting in the Apple WatchOS 7 update. The players,  wearing an Apple or Samsung watch, burned between 400 and 700 calories per hour. Of course there are variations in these numbers depending on the level of play, intensity of the match, and person's weight. But these numbers are consistent with other reports on the internet.

I don't have a smart watch but do have a Fitbit so I know when I play for 60-90 minutes I average about 5000 steps which is two miles for me since I am 5'5”. So imagine if you play multiple events in a tournament over a couple of days. You clearly are burning thousands and thousands of calories. In fact, I interviewed Coach Andy Gutierrez and he said professional player Kyle Yates had 16 miles on his smart watch during one day of a tournament playing singles. And it really is interesting we are burning so many calories playing the sport because we are only hitting the ball 25-30% of the time spent on the court. The rest of the minutes we are chasing the ball after the point ends or we are getting ready to start the next point.

Now, one thing to be careful of if you are burning all of these calories is you need to eat. This means not only having a meal before and after you play. But you should really be eating between games or matches if you are going to be playing for more than an hour or two. This is because your body only stores so much energy and then you hit a wall much like we've seen marathoners do near the end of the race. I know I experienced this one time on a pickleball court where I played for more than 1.5 hours. At the two-hour mark, I couldn't even hit the ball in the court despite normally being a consistent player. So while pickleball is great for burning calories, be sure to take care of yourself if you play an extended period of time.

Oh, and don’t forget to hydrate! But we’ll save that for another day.