Common fitness knowledge says that both walking and running will burn the same number of calories per mile. I am not quite sure where this piece of information first showed up or why it persists today, but I hope to clarify some of the confusion in this article.
Walking and running are perhaps the two most basic and leading forms of human movement. Every able bodied human can walk and run and learned to do so without any formalized training. Compare this to other activities, such as biking, swimming or swinging a golf club, which require more training in order to perform those movements correctly. This is one of the main reasons that walking and running are two of the best ways to get in shape and improve your overall health.
The logic for both walking and running a mile burning the same amount of calories makes sense. You cover the same distance so it should require the same amount of energy, right? Not necessarily. Calorie burning is usually closely related to the amount of oxygen you consume. When you are performing continuous exercise you burn about five calories for every liter of oxygen that you consume. Running generally requires significantly more oxygen than walking, even over the same distance.
In a paper titled “Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running”, which was published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers measured the actual calorie burn of 12 men and 12 women while running and walking 1,600 meters on a treadmill. The results of the study showed the following:
o The men burned an average of 124 calories while running, and 88 while walking.
o The women burned 105 and 74.
The men ended up burning more calories due to the fact that they were larger and had more muscle mass.
After looking at these results (running burned about 50% more calories than walking) you have to ask why there is such a calorie burning disparity between the two activities. When you walk your center of gravity rides along fairly smoothly with very little vertical movement. If you were to put a pen on your shoulder and walk along a wall, the mark left by the pen would be pretty straight.
Running is actually the act of taking a whole bunch of little jumps in a row. You are actually jumping from one foot to the other. Each jump raises and then lowers your center of gravity. If we were to trace the path of your torso there would be a lot of vertical movement. This continual rise and fall of your weight requires a tremendous amount of additional effort above and beyond the demands of walking the same distance.
One important point from this discussion is the fact that there is a difference between the total number of calories burned and the net number of calories burned. Net calories burned are figured by subtracting the baseline number of calories you burn from the total number of calories burned. Baseline calories are how many calories your body burns just existing. So if you burn 200 calories in a treadmill workout and your baseline metabolism for the same amount of time is 50 calories, your net calorie burn is 150 calories. This is am important point to remember when calculating calories burned or else you can end up with a grossly inflated calorie figure.
The study mentioned above calculated the net calorie burn of running a mile in 9:30 versus walking a mile in 19:00. The men burned 105 calories running and 52 walking. The women burned 91 running and 43 walking. That is, running burns twice as many net calories per mile as walking. And since you can run two miles in the time it takes to walk one mile, running burns four times as many net calories per hour as walking.
This article is not intended to bad mouth walking. Walking can be an excellent form of exercise that can have many benefits. This article intended to dispel the myth that walking and running are the same in terms of caloric burning ability. As this article illustrates, running is much more effective form of exercise for burning calories. Walkers just might have to walk a little more in order to hit their weight goal.
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