How many calories you'd actually burn doing 9 Winter Olympic sports

Getty Images

We can't all be Olympians.

But we couch-bound Olympics-watchers can still reap serious health benefits from trying out some of the sports in play at the Winter Games.

We've rounded up nine of the most exciting winter sports to determine about how many calories you'd burn based on a metric called METs.

We calculated how much the average Joe and Jane USA might burn doing each Olympian-style sport for 60 minutes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average American woman weighs about 168.5 pounds (~76kg), and the average man is somewhere around 195.7 lbs (~89 kg), so we've used those weights.

The calorie estimates are based on a tool built by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Arizona State University. Of course, they aren't perfect, and the numbers would likely be different for you based on your fitness, age, and other factors.

But with that in mind, take a look at what a spin around the rink or slide down an icy chute could do for your body.