About this site

Most pet exercise advice gives you a range. This site tries to give you a number, and to show its working.

Why it exists

Ask how much exercise a dog needs and you get “thirty to sixty minutes a day” — advice that treats a nine-kilogram Pug and a thirty-four-kilogram Labrador as the same animal. They are not. One overheats in twenty minutes because of the shape of its airway; the other needs an hour before it settles.

This planner starts from the specific animal in front of you: species, breed, age, current and target weight, how active it already is, and how often you can realistically get out. It returns a distance, a duration, a calorie figure and a food adjustment — then tells you which of those numbers it had to cap for safety, and why.

How the numbers are worked out

The calculation runs entirely in your browser, in this order:

Resting energy requirement from body weight, scaled by a maintenance factor for species and life stage, and adjusted for how active the animal already is.
A safe weekly weight-loss target — around 1% of body weight per week for dogs and half that for cats, because cats lost weight too quickly are at risk of hepatic lipidosis.
A split between movement and the bowl. Exercise alone cannot safely close the gap, so the planner covers part of the deficit with walking and asks the food to do the rest, never dropping below the resting requirement of the target weight.
Distance and duration from the energy that movement needs to supply, at a walking pace estimated for that breed and condition.

The rules it will not break

Several limits override the arithmetic. If the maths asks for more than these allow, the plan is capped and the reason is shown next to it:

The five-minute rule for puppies — roughly five minutes of structured exercise per month of age, to protect growth plates that have not closed.
A hard ceiling for flat-faced breeds. Pugs, French and English Bulldogs, Boxers and their relatives cannot cool themselves by panting the way a longer-muzzled animal can.
No calorie restriction for growing animals. A puppy or kitten above its target weight is given movement and a note to speak to a vet, not a diet.
Gentler starts for sedentary pets, and shorter sessions for seniors and joint-sensitive breeds.

Where the figures come from

The planner is not built on rules of thumb. Each of the quantities below is taken from published work, and every one of them is listed here so you can check it against the source rather than take our word for it.

1.Energetics and mechanics of terrestrial locomotion I
Journal of Experimental Biology 97:1–21, 1982.
The cost of moving, and how it scales with body size. Their equation gives the energy to shift one kilogram of animal one metre as 10.7 × mass^-0.316 joules — which is why a small dog on this site is charged more per kilogram than a large one for the same walk.
2.Challenges in Measuring Energy Expenditure in Companion Animals
Journal of Nutrition, 2022.
The reality check on the figure above: dogs over 10 kg need roughly 1 kcal per kilogram per kilometre travelled, smaller dogs and cats 1.6–1.9. It is also the source for charging a session the cost of standing — about 50% above lying down — on top of the cost of moving.
3.Limb length and the energy cost of trotting, reported in Canine Performance Nutrition
AAVN Symposium Proceedings, via Today's Veterinary Practice, 2013.
Why build changes the answer. Long-limbed dogs trot at about 0.6 kcal per kilogram per kilometre against 1.3 for short-legged ones — more than a twofold difference at the same body weight. It is the reason a Greyhound and a Basset Hound of equal weight get very different distances here.
4.Nutritional Requirements of Small Animals
Merck Veterinary Manual.
The resting energy requirement, 70 × bodyweight^0.75, and the multipliers applied to it for life stage — 1.6 for a neutered adult dog, 1.2 for a neutered adult cat, 2.0 for a puppy over four months, 2.5 for a kitten. This site uses those figures unchanged.
5.How Fast Is Too Fast For My Pet To Lose Weight?
Tufts Petfoodology — Deborah E. Linder, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Nutrition), 2018.
The safe rate of loss: 1–2% of body weight per week for dogs, 0.5–2% for cats, and the reason cats are held at the bottom of that range — losing fat faster than the liver can process it causes hepatic lipidosis. This planner uses 1% for dogs and 0.5% for cats, the cautious end of both.
6.Association of age and body condition with physical activity of domestic cats
Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 2022.
The sanity check on the cat side: physical activity accounts for up to 30% of a cat's total daily energy use. The structured play this site prescribes lands near 9% of daily needs, which leaves room for everything else a cat does on its own.

What we estimated instead

Some of what this planner needs has simply not been measured. Where that is true we have made a judgement and said so here, rather than attaching a citation to a number that did not come from one.

The intensity of cat play

There is no reliable published measurement of what a wand-toy session costs a cat. The figures circulating online — one popular claim is 2.8 kcal per minute — are not physiologically possible: for a five-kilogram cat that would mean roughly seventeen times its resting metabolic rate, held for ten minutes. We instead cost active play at about five times resting metabolism, which works out to the cat covering roughly a kilometre of effective ground per session in bursts, and to structured play supplying under a tenth of its daily energy use. Both of those are consistent with the published feline activity figures, but the number itself is our estimate.

Which breeds count as long- or short-limbed

The 0.6-against-1.3 spread for limb length is measured. Sorting individual breeds into those groups is not — we used the conventional veterinary categories (sighthounds on one side, chondrodystrophic breeds such as Dachshunds, Bassets and Corgis on the other) and left everything else at the average.

Walking pace, and the session ceilings

Comfortable pace by breed and age, and the caps that stop a plan getting longer than is sensible for a senior, a flat-faced breed or a toy breed, are drawn from general veterinary advice rather than from a single measured dataset. They are deliberately conservative: every one of them can only ever shorten a plan, never extend it.

What it is not

These are population averages. They cannot account for medication, neuter status, thyroid disease, heart or orthopaedic conditions, or body condition score — all of which move the real numbers substantially. The planner is a starting point for a conversation with a vet, not a replacement for one. Nobody here is a veterinarian.

If a figure here contradicts what your vet tells you about your animal, your vet is right. They have examined the pet; this site has four form fields.

Corrections

If you spot a figure you believe is wrong, we would genuinely like to know — particularly if you work in veterinary practice. Get in touch through the contact page.