The past week has been particularly challenging when it comes to physical activity.
Like I mentioned in my last post, my motivation has been pretty low. I think that has a lot to do with being away from home (and slightly homesick!), routine, and my kitties (who I'm perhaps a little too attached to) - my mood has just been lower than usual, and I've been dragging my butt. I also haven't been sleeping as well or as long as I'd like to.
My schedule has also been a bit tougher than usual. I've been working 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. shifts, and usually get to leave the hospital closer to 2 a.m. I then have a commute home of just over an hour by public transit! I don't mind - this is the job, after all! Nonetheless, work + commute has really been an adjustment. At home, I live less than ten minutes away from the hospital on foot, and my gym is only ten minutes walking in the opposite direction. In fact, the school gym and pool are on the same campus as the hospital, so if I'm really feeling crunched for time, I can trip over there in about 3 minutes.
Nevertheless, I've been getting lots of walking and a bit of running in. On Day 45, I went for a slow run with no particular distance or route in mind; I just wanted to explore the neighbourhood I'm staying in . It ended up being best that I didn't have a plan, because I got completely lost and had to rely on my phone's GPS to get me home. Yesterday, Day 46, I turned my commute home from the hospital into a bus ride interspersed with brisk walking in the wee hours of the morning. The cold and snowy walk ended up being a refreshing end to a long shift in the stuffy ER air.
On the topic of walking and running, I overheard someone saying to her friend the other day that walking and running the same distance burns the same number of calories.
As someone who runs for fitness but also hopes for weight loss, this immediately grabbed my attention. I've heard it repeated a hundred times, and read it just as many times on every amateur fitness forum out there.
At first blush, it makes perfect sense - moving identical masses over the identical distances should require identical work and thus burn identical calories. Right, Sir Issac Newton?
But, as with all things in life, it's just not that simple.
I read a recent article (abstract available here) that clearly showed both that energy expenditure is significantly higher during running than walking, and also that walkers return to baseline energy expenditure more quickly than do their running peers. I really liked that this study looked at average fitness young individuals, meaning that the results apply to people who aren't high-performance athletes, the population that is often the focus of exercise physiology studies.
This study found the same - running requires more energy than walking. The interesting bit here was that both the walking and the running were for quite short distances (only 1.6k), and took place on a treadmill. Evidently, these differences don't need time to build up over long distances, which is good news for those of us who don't always have a lot of time to be physically active in a day.
There are a number of other studies out there that have looked at the energy expenditure differences between walking and running, and they all arrive at the same conclusion - walking burns lots of calories, but running burns even more. I encourage you to do a quick search for energy expenditure in walking and running on PubMed and satisfy yourself that I'm not pulling your leg.
So why do we burn more calories running that walking? Was Newton wrong?
Not exactly, but when we think about walking and running simply as moving a mass over a distance, we miss something fundamental about the complexities of running.
Running isn't just moving weight forward, it is jumping from foot to foot as we move weight forward. We bend our knees and move our centre of gravity up and down, and not just translationally.
Does this mean that walking is useless? Absolutely not. The best physical activity is the physical activity that you will do. If you will walk, then you should!
I'm short on time today, but I hope to fill in more details and add more research to this topic in the future. For now, here's an accessible non-scientific read that talks about why running burns more calories than running.
And please, don't take my word for it. If you've got a Forerunner or other calorie-monitor that uses your heart rate, do a little experiment and let me know how it goes: Run and walk the same distances and see which burns more calories for you. I'll do the same and post here...
Like I mentioned in my last post, my motivation has been pretty low. I think that has a lot to do with being away from home (and slightly homesick!), routine, and my kitties (who I'm perhaps a little too attached to) - my mood has just been lower than usual, and I've been dragging my butt. I also haven't been sleeping as well or as long as I'd like to.My schedule has also been a bit tougher than usual. I've been working 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. shifts, and usually get to leave the hospital closer to 2 a.m. I then have a commute home of just over an hour by public transit! I don't mind - this is the job, after all! Nonetheless, work + commute has really been an adjustment. At home, I live less than ten minutes away from the hospital on foot, and my gym is only ten minutes walking in the opposite direction. In fact, the school gym and pool are on the same campus as the hospital, so if I'm really feeling crunched for time, I can trip over there in about 3 minutes.
Nevertheless, I've been getting lots of walking and a bit of running in. On Day 45, I went for a slow run with no particular distance or route in mind; I just wanted to explore the neighbourhood I'm staying in . It ended up being best that I didn't have a plan, because I got completely lost and had to rely on my phone's GPS to get me home. Yesterday, Day 46, I turned my commute home from the hospital into a bus ride interspersed with brisk walking in the wee hours of the morning. The cold and snowy walk ended up being a refreshing end to a long shift in the stuffy ER air.On the topic of walking and running, I overheard someone saying to her friend the other day that walking and running the same distance burns the same number of calories.
As someone who runs for fitness but also hopes for weight loss, this immediately grabbed my attention. I've heard it repeated a hundred times, and read it just as many times on every amateur fitness forum out there.
At first blush, it makes perfect sense - moving identical masses over the identical distances should require identical work and thus burn identical calories. Right, Sir Issac Newton?
But, as with all things in life, it's just not that simple.
I read a recent article (abstract available here) that clearly showed both that energy expenditure is significantly higher during running than walking, and also that walkers return to baseline energy expenditure more quickly than do their running peers. I really liked that this study looked at average fitness young individuals, meaning that the results apply to people who aren't high-performance athletes, the population that is often the focus of exercise physiology studies.
This study found the same - running requires more energy than walking. The interesting bit here was that both the walking and the running were for quite short distances (only 1.6k), and took place on a treadmill. Evidently, these differences don't need time to build up over long distances, which is good news for those of us who don't always have a lot of time to be physically active in a day.
There are a number of other studies out there that have looked at the energy expenditure differences between walking and running, and they all arrive at the same conclusion - walking burns lots of calories, but running burns even more. I encourage you to do a quick search for energy expenditure in walking and running on PubMed and satisfy yourself that I'm not pulling your leg.
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| A nice place to get lost, whether walking or running... |
So why do we burn more calories running that walking? Was Newton wrong?
Not exactly, but when we think about walking and running simply as moving a mass over a distance, we miss something fundamental about the complexities of running.
Running isn't just moving weight forward, it is jumping from foot to foot as we move weight forward. We bend our knees and move our centre of gravity up and down, and not just translationally.
Does this mean that walking is useless? Absolutely not. The best physical activity is the physical activity that you will do. If you will walk, then you should!
I'm short on time today, but I hope to fill in more details and add more research to this topic in the future. For now, here's an accessible non-scientific read that talks about why running burns more calories than running.
And please, don't take my word for it. If you've got a Forerunner or other calorie-monitor that uses your heart rate, do a little experiment and let me know how it goes: Run and walk the same distances and see which burns more calories for you. I'll do the same and post here...
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