Walking vs Running a Mile – Which Burns More Calories?

Posted on January 22, 2007
Filed Under Fitness, Weight Management | 1 Comment

The answer is neither. Regardless of how you cover that distance, the same expenditure of calories will be required. Surprised? Most folks are. They generally believe that working harder, faster, and more strenuously leads to quicker results, in terms of both fitness and weight loss.

But since the actual calorie burn rate is approximately 60 calories per 100 lbs of body weight per mile traveled, it really doesn’t make any difference whether you run or walk. So if you weigh 180 lbs, you’ll consume 108 calories to cover that mile.

However, the runner will finish first. If that person were to continue running until the walker finished the mile, then the runner would’ve burned more calories, not because of running, but because they covered more distance.

Dr. Dean Ornish, clinical professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, agrees when he says “All things being equal, you will burn more calories by running an hour than walking an hour. But he goes on to say that walking a mile will burn more fat calories than running a mile — although it takes longer to do so.

His reasoning is that when you run a mile, you’re burning mostly sugar, or carbohydrates, which is how your body gives you fast bursts of energy. But when you walk a mile, it gives your metabolism time to switch from burning carbohydrates to burning fat.

This idea got quite popular several years ago when scientists reported that during high-intensity exercise, the body burned mostly stored carbohydrates for fuel, as opposed to burning stored fat as it did during lower-intensity activity. As a result, the exercise world ended up over-zealously promoting low-intensity workouts and fat-burning classes as the magic weight-loss formula.

However, as with most things, that’s not the whole story. It is true that the body burns a higher percentage of fat calories during more mellow exercise like walking. But during a higher-intensity cardio work-out, you burn a greater number of overall calories (the obvious goal for losing weight) and subsequently just as much total fat.

So the ideal thing to do is strike a happy medium. Combine walking and running, say by starting out walking for 5 minutes to warm up, then run for about 3 minutes, walk for 3, and so on alternating through about 30 minutes. Adjust these intervals based on where you’re starting from, then gradually increase both the running interval and total time to fit your specific needs.

Too many people start on a running program without working up to it and have to stop because they overstress a knee or ankle. While they wait for it to heal, they lose the impetus to do anything. The above approach adds the aerobic component to walking but introduces it slowly allowing your body to become conditioned. The result is ongoing exercise with less injury.

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