For those whose work has them chained to a desk, concerns about whether or not they are getting enough exercise often creep into their minds.

In Japan, it is estimated that an average adult male should burn about 2,000 calories a day while an adult female should use around 1,700 (numbers vary according to age and build). Even armed with that knowledge, many people still consume more calories than they burn by indulging in snacks between meals and eating excessively late into the night. A lot of desk jockeys are probably wondering what they should do to better their situation.

Well, there might be some good news. The number of calories burnt at the click of a mouse has recently been calculated.

In addition to providing calorie counts for food, recently published Convert Anything to Calories (PHP Science World) also calculates the number of calories burned through various human activities and events, and is where we can find a scientific assessment for the number of calories used when clicking a mouse.

Technical jargon and methods aside, the authors calculated the “total volume of the muscles used to bend the index finger to be 10.8 cubic centimeters with a total weight of 11.7 grams.”

“On average, 16.7 micromoles of ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) are consumed in moving one gram of muscle for one second. So, the total amount of ATP burned to move 11.7 grams of muscle in the index finger is approximately 195 micromoles (11.7g×16.7μ mol/g). There are 7.3 calories in one mole of ATP energy, so the number of calories burned in clicking the mouse equals about 1.42 (7.3/1000) X 195).”

An annotation adds “the calculation assumes the muscle contracted completely, so the actual amount of calories used is a little less.”

There you have it, a little less than 1.42 calories per click. It’s doubtful we’ll see any mouse click exercise videos coming out any time soon, however, you may want to throw in a few extra clicks every now and then for a little peace of mind. Oh, and maybe give up some of those late night snack binges as well.

Source: Yahoo! Japan