Burpees | other CrossFit workouts

CrossFit is by design “constantly varied”, so you are going to have a difficult time getting an exact amount of calories for a WOD. Some workouts are heavy on cardio, some workouts have moderate weight oly lifts in them, others have a ton of gymnastic moves and a bunch of plyo metric exercises... and most have a combination of some or all of them..

Also, exercises which might be taxing to me, like wall balls, may not be taxing to you. Sometimes this is just the nature of the exercise, sometimes it has to do with body mechanics. Rowing, wall balls, etc are usually easier for taller people, while Olympic lifts are in general usually easier for shorter people due to the less distance needed to move the mass.

What I do, and what I’ve seen other people do, is assign an arbitrary calorie count per minute of work that aligns with their goals. When I was trying to lose weight I assigned two calories per minute, and now that I’m essentially in a recomp, I assign 7 calories per minute. It’s definitely not perfect - I did a WOD with one of the movements being a 100 Calorie Ski, and the overall WOD took 13 Minutes. I most likely burned more than 91 calories.

I have seen anecdotal evidence that men performing “Cindy” averaged 15 calories per minute, but the write up of that study did not show the METS, VO2, etc if the participants, so I’ll take it with a grain of salt.

I don’t think I would trust a HRM for this either, not really well suited to CrossFit style workouts.