Evidence that running and walking have the same calorie burn

I was listening to something or reading something the other day and one of the things that was stated was that it doesn't make any difference whether you jog it or walk it, traveling a certain distance by foot is going to burn the same amount of calories.

I didn't believe this when I heard it because it certainly doesn't feel like this is the case when you are doing it. So I have been collecting some data lately to see what I can find out on my own.

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Now before I begin I want everyone to know that when I say walking I mean a sort of exercise walk, not the sort of walking pace you would do if you are in the airport and your flight isn't leaving for 4 more hours and you are strolling around. I haven't tested "meandering" pace and I don't really think I have the patience to try. The walking I am talking about is a more intentional sort of fast walk, but not one that is really intended to work up a sweat or hurt you. It's just kind of fast paced walking. I hope that makes sense.

This first set of data comes from a 5k that I did at what is for me, a pretty fast pace. Take note of the active calories because the total calories is just factoring in the amount of calories that your body burns just by being alive.

Except for the warm up period and one place in the middle where I had to slow down because of traffic, I maintained a pretty steady heart rate as well. My pace was something I was happy with

This, for me, is a relatively difficult run. I marked it down as "moderate" because that's what I feel about it. At no point in time was my body screaming for me to stop, but I also don't feel as though I was pushing the limits by running at this pace.

So great. in just over half an hour I burned 400 calories.

Walk and run hybrid

I had plenty of energy left so at the end of the 5k I decided to walk for a km then run more if I felt like it. After the 1k walk I ran a k, then I would walk a km, then I would run. So in this next 5k we are doing 3km of walking (at a fast pace for walking) and 2km of running.

This resulted in me going just over 5km, the same as the run for a full 5km and as you can read, the amount of active calories burned is roughly the same. In fact, I think it might have been exactly the same but the 2nd portion was actually 100 meters longer and that might account for the 8 calorie difference.

here my heart rate is up and down and I am sure it is easy to ID where I was running and where I was not.

I wasn't running quite as fast as I was during the first 5k that I did where I just ran and did no walking.

In the end it took me 12 minutes longer to do the walk/run hybrid and I can tell you that I definitely know which one of these two things is easier for me.

So from my perspective, if the objective is simply to burn calories there isn't really any good reason to push it to run faster. Also, there isn't a massive time difference between the two activities but I do know which one I am hurting more from doing.

I think it should be obvious that the cardiovascular benefits as far as endurance is concerned would be in favor of the full-time running but the reason why I am playing around with this data is because it is very important to me that I don't end up hating the exercise that I do because if I do hate it, it is easier to skip doing it.

Also, I am not using super advanced tech in determining this: It is a $120 sports watch that probably has a very simplistic method of guessing the calories burned based on my age, weight, and heart rate.

No matter how it is determined though, you can't really argue with math and it would appear that run or walk, a 5k burns the same amount of calories regardless of how fast you perform it.

Next up I am going to do a 10k where I alternate between running and walking for the entire time with no breaks.