Don’t bother, you won’t lose any weight. via Flickr user Lulu11

Cheap exercise is hard to come by, hence all the guides to taking advantage of gym deals or talking them down to a level you’re comfortable paying. You could always run, we guess, that’s free. But running is boooring and gets worse than usual in the winter months. It was a widely held belief that you could burn a lot of calories by getting down with someone in the biblical sense, which is also free, but now science says that just isn’t true.

The New England Journal of Medicine says that since the average round of sexual activity lasts only 6 minutes, it consequently burns only 21 calories. It was an urban legend of sorts that it burned between 100 and 300 calories, but guess not. For strapping young sex gods and goddesses like us, maybe the sex ends up better exercise than the average roll in the hay, but it’s still distressing news. Of course, if we’re unhappy about this, we can always just walk around frowning, since another urban legend holds that it burns more energy to do that than to smile.