About CosmoMET

CosmoMET is not for everyone. It is not a fitness app for athletes, gym enthusiasts, or people chasing six-pack abs. There are hundreds of apps for that.

This is for people carrying significant body weight who want to live longer. People whose joints ache, whose back hurts, who can't do burpees or run a mile and shouldn't try. People who've been told to "just walk 10,000 steps" but know that walking 10,000 steps at 300+ pounds is not the same as walking 10,000 steps at 170.

It's for the person who has 5 minutes between meetings and wants to do 10 squats and know that it actually counted for something. The person who does arm rotations and stretches at their desk and wonders "does this even matter?" (It does.)

It's for anyone whose primary goal is not dying early rather than looking good at the beach. Longevity, cardiovascular health, functional strength, mobility, and independence as they age. That's it. No vanity metrics, no before/after photos, no shame-based motivation. Just honest numbers and a daily target.

The research is clear: the single most impactful thing a sedentary person can do for longevity is move more. Studies show that going from zero activity to even modest daily movement reduces all-cause mortality by 30-50%. The exact equivalent depends on body weight, intensity, and duration — but the threshold is lower than most people think.

The problem: most fitness tracking assumes you're a healthy-weight person doing structured workouts. If you weigh 350 pounds and do 10 bodyweight squats, most apps either don't track it or assign the same value they'd give a 150-pound person. That's wrong. At 350 pounds, those 10 squats are a 350-pound loaded squat — genuine heavy resistance training. The metabolic cost is dramatically higher.

CosmoMET was built to solve this: give honest, body-weight-adjusted credit for every movement, whether it's a set of squats, 3 minutes of stretching, a walk down the hall, or 15 minutes on a treadmill at an incline. No inflated numbers, no flattery. Just the real math, so you know exactly where you stand relative to the targets that actually matter for longevity.

MET stands for Metabolic Equivalent of Task. It's a standardized way to measure the energy cost of physical activity. 1 MET = the energy you burn sitting completely still (your resting metabolic rate). 2 METs = twice that. 5 METs = five times.

Walking at 3 mph on flat ground is approximately 3.3 METs. That's our baseline. We convert every exercise into "how many minutes of walking at 3 mph would burn the same calories?" Then we multiply by 100 steps/minute to get step-equivalents.

The MET values in CosmoMET come from the Ainsworth Compendium of Physical Activities (2011), the gold-standard reference used by exercise physiologists worldwide. The Compendium assigns MET values to over 800 activities based on direct measurement via indirect calorimetry (measuring oxygen consumption during exercise).

For bodyweight exercises, we adjust for your actual body weight because METs are mass-normalized but caloric output is not. A 370-pound person doing squats at 5.8 METs burns 17 kcal/min. A 170-pound person at the same MET level burns 8 kcal/min. Both are working at the same relative intensity, but the heavier person is doing more absolute work.

Rather than tracking calories (which are hard to interpret) or METs (which are abstract), CosmoMET converts everything into walking step-equivalents. This is intuitive: "this set of squats was worth 177 walking steps" is immediately understandable.

The conversion formula:

1. Calculate calories burned: kcal = (MET x 3.5 x body_mass_kg) / 200 x duration_min
2. Calculate walking baseline: walk_kcal_per_min = (3.3 x 3.5 x body_mass_kg) / 200
3. Convert: step_equiv = (exercise_kcal / walk_kcal_per_min) x 100

A 10% EPOC (Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption) bonus is applied to resistance exercises, based on LaForgia et al. (2006). Walking gets no EPOC bonus since steady-state low-intensity walking produces negligible afterburn.

As your body weight changes, the step-equivalent values adjust automatically. A 320-pound squat is worth fewer step-equivalents than a 370-pound squat because there's less weight to move. Walking steps always count 1:1 regardless of weight.

CosmoMET uses a two-tier target system:

Streaks count consecutive days hitting the floor (7,000), not the goal. The floor is what matters for longevity. The goal is a bonus.

Treadmill step-equivalents use the ACSM Metabolic Walking Equation, the clinical standard from the American College of Sports Medicine:

Where speed is in meters/min and grade is the tangent of the incline angle. The key insight: incline is far more powerful than speed. Walking at 2.0 mph on an 8-degree incline (6.4 METs) is as metabolically demanding as jogging — but with dramatically lower joint impact.

CosmoMET includes 31 tracked activities across 7 categories:

You don't have to do them all. You don't have to do any particular one. Pick what works for your body, your schedule, and your pain level today. The goal is the goal — how you get there is up to you.

CosmoMET is free and always will be. There are no paid features, no subscriptions, no ads. It costs money to host, though — servers, domain, database, SSL.

If CosmoMET has been useful to you and you'd like to help keep it running, you can buy me a coffee. No pressure, no guilt, no perks. Just gratitude.