comparing running to walking 5km (calories burned)

I'm still a bit obsessed with determining whether or not the things I have been reading online about walking and running the same distance burning the same amount of calories so I have been dividing up my runs in various way to see what sort of results it comes up with.

I'm not using a terribly advanced set of equipment. It is merely a $120 smartwatch / fitness band and a $350 phone. I think that the watch does all the work but what the hell do I know?

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It is starting to get cold enough here that I am going to have to break out the winter gear soon but am still sticking with shorts for now. I am one of those stubborn people that believes that if you are getting cold you aren't working hard enough. The real danger lies in when you stop and the moisture on your body has a chance to make you shiver. I look at it as "if you keep running, you will stay warm." This has been the case so far but it gets so cold here in January and February that I don't think you actually can run fast enough for this to remain true.

One thing is for sure though: it is getting harder to convince myself to head out the door because the hardest part of any workout is putting on your shoes and opening the front door.

anyway, on this last run I returned to something that I have done before in the past where I do a 5k initially while barely entering zone 4 of BPM then the 2nd 5km I try to stay in zone 2 and 3 for the entire time. The reason for this is to check and see if what I have been reading about it not mattering how fast you run a 5k, the caloric burn is the same. For the most part I have been able to confirm that for the most part, this is the case.

here's my heart rate on the first one and it is slow at the beginning because I just started. Once i get up to speed I adjust how fast I am moving based exclusively on my heart rate. I do not even know how fast I am moving until I stop or will briefly be notified at the end of each km.

This 5 km portion took almost 33 minutes and burned 384 calories (active calories, I am ignoring the calories your body burns normally just by being alive.)

Here is my heart rate for the second stage where I was walking quite a bit but trying to keep my heart rate in 2nd and 3rd zone.

I was alternating km's because staying in zone 2 and 3 normally is a reasonably fast walk or a run so slow that I am not actually running at all. I see now that I was entering zone 4 a lot more frequently than I had anticipated or had planned, but it doesn't really matter because the idea here is to test a wide array of 5km runs with varying speeds and heart rates.

This second portion took 44 minutes and burned 424 calories (again, ONLY active calories).

Now here is where we start to enter the "doubt" portion of my research gathering because the first 5km run, which was more difficult, burned 40 calories less. This wouldn't be that big of a deal if we were talking about a wider range but that is a 10% difference even though both were 5km in distance.

So I am still at the point where I consider the data to be inconclusive.

However, this is a nice way to look at things if the data is correct because if it is, that means that the slower and easier portion of the run is actually burning 10% more calories.

let's now compare this to the straight 10km run I did without slowing down or taking any breaks. That took 1 hour and 14 minutes and burned 855 calories. That is 47 calories MORE than when I ran 5km then walked 5km.

Haha, I don't seem to be making much progress here. No matter how I do it it seems the values don't line up where I expect them to.

There could also be a lot of other factors at play here such as me getting a bit better at it and therefore requiring less effort to run that distance as well.

So for now it appears as though walking and running mixed with breaks burns the most per 5km portion. That's great news for my lazy days!

if you have any 5km caloric burn stats that you want to share that would be helpful for me.