Running vs. Walking for Weight Loss

If you are looking to lose weight, you have a lot of options, but two of the most common things people do is walk or run. Walking and running have their place in fitness. Both burn calories and lower body fat. Both are convenient activities that require no equipment. You just need a good pair of running shoes. You can do them anywhere, and you get the benefit of nice scenery and sunshine. However, for weight loss purposes, running is obviously better than walking.

While you will lose roughly the same amount of calories with the same distance covered, you lose more calories running than walking at the same amount of time. For instance, you lose more or less a hundred calories per mile walking or running. But you cover a mile faster running than walking. So within a specified amount of time you burn more calories when you run.

Walking burns roughly 300 calories per hour. But running on the average burns about 800 calories an hour. That is quite an advantage, and the faster you run, the more calories you burn.

One of the great things about walking is it burns fat, as all low intensity workouts do. The body tends to metabolize fat on low intensity activities. So this may seem as though walking is the best way to go for fat loss. However, you actually burn more than twice the amount of calories you burn running than walking. Eventually, that leads to greater fat loss.

Another factor that makes running more effective for weight loss is its ability to affect your appetite. An exercise as intense as running produces high levels of peptide YY, a hormone that suppresses appetite. Walking does not prompt the body the produce this hormone. As a result, a session of running suppresses hunger, which means you don’t tend to overeat. On the contrary, walking makes you feel hungry afterwards. One reason could be due to your body telling you you have replace burnt fuel. Without a hunger-suppressing hormone to counteract this, you tend to eat, and usually you eat more than you what you had previously burnt.

For this reason, runners tend to lose more weight than walkers, regardless of whether both types of people cover the same mileage. Runners tend to have smaller waist, lower body fat, and more toned muscles.

The catch is running poses greater risk of injury. This isn’t hard to understand. Running puts more impact on the joints, especially for unfit beginners. This is why you shouldn’t put on your sneakers and start covering 10 miles in one hour if today is your first day. Running may not be good for you, too, if you recently had an injury or you’re obese.

The point of this article is, while you may choose running over walking for fat loss, you also have to take into account certain factors. Are you fit for running? Have you been running for a while? If so, by all means, choose running over walking, because the benefits certainly outweigh risks in this case.

However, choose walking if you’re a newbie, recovering from an injury, or significantly overweight. It burns calories and conditions or reconditions your body, especially your feet and legs, for fitness.