Comparing 1km walking to 1km running

I started checking all of this shortly after reading an article that claimed that there isn't much difference in how many calories you burn if you are running/jogging/walking. I found this very hard to believe despite their science-y sounding stats so I decided to run (pun intended) my own tests using my sport watch and phone to see what it says based on my own body.

In my mind, I always felt like if your heart rate was getting higher that you would burn more and this is obviously true, but for some reason it does appear thus far, that since you spend more time walking a distance than you would running it, that it all kind of balances out in the end. Running burns more calories per minute but takes fewer minutes. Walking burns fewer calories per minute but takes more minutes. Makes sense kinda right?

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when I started jogging regularly and started getting better and faster at it, I would see people walking on the run trails and even though it isn't nice I would be thinking "stop being lazy, at least try to exercise!" but as it turns out I was thinking about it all wrong.

I have conducted a few mixed runs where I would jog one km the walk the next but those figures might have been tainted by my heart rate being too low after the walk, or too high after the run portion. So I did them both separately.

This is one km of walking but keep in mind it wasn't a leisurely stroll, I was still walking kind of fast but not doing that ridiculous speed walking that people just look really silly when they are doing it. It's kind of like a NYC pedestrian speed walk.

This is the run. The word "run" means different things to different people. For me, anything under 7 minutes and 30 seconds is pretty fast but would be considered kind of slow for more experienced runners. The point kind of remains the same though and what I was trying to showcase here is that 1km done in an easy way is going to burn the same amount of calories as the harder way. We really only need to look at active calories because "total calories" include your metabolism and that is the amount of calories that your body burns just by you being alive.

You can see that the figures are very similar but my heart rate is much higher when I am jogging. The 26 meter elevation loss that is shown in the run is BS, I activated my watch at the top of the stairs in my building but didn't tell it to start recording until I was already ready to start running.

I was unaware that my watch would do this for you without asking. I don't like that because it has kind of screwed up my data. It screwed up my pace as well because you can see on the second data-set that the total time in the top left is 6:52 yet my "average pace" is 6:43 per km...even though it was only recording for 1km. So that is something I am going to have to take into account if I want to get truly accurate results. I am going to need to go and sit somewhere for a while and wait for the watch to realize I am not moving anymore and do some sort of reset.

But the point is still valid even though my data was thrown off a bit by the smart-watch trying to factor in the little bit I did before I started walking and that is that walking or running burns about the same amount of calories.

Walking is easy, and I would say it is a little bit too easy. When I was walking the 1km between the 1km runs, I started wanting to run earlier so perhaps I need to alter my regimen to be running 1km and walking 500 meters.

At the end of the day the only reason why I am doing this is because I live my exercise life by the theory that whatever it is that you are doing for exercise needs to be something that you don't dread. Walking is pretty darn easy, isn't it? Also you can do a lot of things while you are walking given the technology that we have now such as listen to a podcast or maybe even learn something by some sort of language lessons or a trivia show. There are many ways that you could multi-task here while walking. When running on the other hand, for me at least, I can only really focus on the running and how it kind of starts to hurt after a while.

So if you are out there just walking I want you to know that you are burning calories... you are burning just as much as the guys that blaze past you running provided you walk as far as they run. Hell, I would say that it is a lot easier to walk 5km than it is to run it, so especially if you are older and trying to avoid any sort of injury or sore muscles and joints, maybe the walking is the better option. Just make sure to keep your heart rate elevated.