I don't think I'm alone when I say that I had always heard that no matter the pace, a person burned the same amount of calories during 1 mile - walking or running. I had always heard that even if you're walking, you burn approxmiately 100 calories a mile, it just takes a lot longer to finish that mile than if you're running.
Even though this is what I had been told, I questioned it's validity. I mean, it's so much harder to RUN than to WALK a mile, right? You MUST be burning more calories!
Well, Runner's World recently published an article about this topic that justified my doubt.
According to this research, running actually burns MORE calories than walking. In fact, it is one of the most efficient means to burn calories.
Find the article here.
"When you perform a continuous exercise, you burn five calories for every liter of oxygen you consume. And running in general consumes a lot more oxygen than walking."
In "Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running," published last December in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, a group of Syracuse University researchers measured the actual calorie burn of 12 men and 12 women while running and walking 1,600 meters (roughly a mile) on a treadmill. Result: The men burned an average of 124 calories while running, and just 88 while walking; the women burned 105 and 74. (The men burned more than the women because they weighed more.)
When you walk, you keep your legs mostly straight, and your center of gravity rides along fairly smoothly on top of your legs. In running, we actually jump from one foot to the other. Each jump raises our center of gravity when we take off, and lowers it when we land, since we bend the knee to absorb the shock. This continual rise and fall of our weight requires a tremendous amount of Newtonian force (fighting gravity) on both takeoff and landing.
Now that you understand why running burns 50 percent more calories per mile than walking, Thanks to the Syracuse researchers, we now know the relative NCB of running a mile in 9:30 versus walking the same mile in 19:00. Their male subjects burned 105 calories running, 52 walking; the women, 91 and 43. 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.
The bottom line: Running is a phenomenal calorie-burning exercise. In public-health terms--that is, in the fight against obesity--it's even more important that running is a low-cost, easy-to-do, year-round activity. Walking doesn't burn as many calories, but it remains a terrific exercise. As David Swain says, "The new research doesn't mean that walking burns any fewer calories than it used to. It just means that walkers might have to walk a little more, or eat a little less, to hit their weight goal."
The article also included this handy calculator to help you determine just how many calories you burn. Check it out!
| What's the Burn? A Calorie Calculator | ||
|---|---|---|
You can use the formulas below to determine your calorie-burn while running and walking. The "Net Calorie Burn" measures calories burned, minus basal metabolism. Scientists consider this the best way to evaluate the actual calorie-burn of any exercise. The walking formulas apply to speeds of 3 to 4 mph. At 5 mph and faster, walking burns more calories than running. | ||
Your Total Calorie Burn/Mile | Your Net Calorie Burn/Mile | |
Running | .75 x your weight (in lbs.) | .63 x your weight |
Walking | .53 x your weight | .30 x your weight |
No comments:
Post a Comment