Who knows if these watches are actually correct or not. A study I recently read came to the conclusion that all manufacturers of sport watches are incorrect with their calculations but I think that it would be unreasonable to expect some little thing on your wrist to give perfectly accurate results when the only way to truly determine such figures is to be hooked up to all sorts of scientific gosmers that measure so many things that your body is doing.
But I have read a lot of literature about how walking burns just as much (from a caloric perspective) as running does, it just takes a lot longer.
On days where I don't really feel like I have it in me to do a bunch of cardio I will still go for a very long walk because of the fact that when I was seriously overweight, I lost a ton of weight by doing very little else other than simply walking because I was so fat that I couldn't really do anything else.
I don't necessarily believe all the things that I read online because these days it seems like no matter what you read someone is trying to tell you to do it differently and they also want to sell you something at the same time. I know from my own experience in my own life that just walking really will help you to lose weight if that is your objective.
The type of walking I was doing the other day though, this would be considered extremely relaxed, probably a bit too relaxed.
330 calories isn't a lot, especially for someone like me that can replace those in about 20 minutes with a couple of beers. It's more than zero though and it's always kind of nice for mental health as well as physical health to get out of the house and be in the closest thing this enormous city has to nature.
The heart rate is kind of a joke honestly, It is rare for me to not break a sweat at all no matter what I am doing, but it's more effort than I would have been putting forth if I was at my desk or sitting on the sofa.
At no point in time was I ever pushing it even a little bit and I just alternated between listening to the sounds of the city, which isn't that bad on these walking paths, and also listening to a podcast. Seriously folks, if you are trying to lose a bit of weight and you already have a show that you like to listen to, why not combine the two? Lately I have been listening to something like a pub quiz and I always end up learning some things that I didn't know before.
When I run a 5k, my watch tells me that my caloric burn is a little bit higher than this, but not very much.
While calorie counts are useful for tracking long-term trends, they should be interpreted as directional signals rather than precise metrics
What that means to me is that the data your watch gives you at the end of whatever activity you are doing should not be taken literally and are not an accurate measurement of what you are actually doing. While the algorithyms are actually quite complex and take into account your individual age, weight, height, and history of exercise that it knows, the general consensus is that all sport watches, even the expensive ones, are 25-40% incorrect about what the actual calories burned are.
That's just fine by me but clinical trials with really expensive and accurate (so they say) equipment also has shown that running vs jogging vs walking burns a pretty close amount of calories based on the distance traveled. There would be exceptions of course such as seriously pushing your heart rate close to maximum, but for normal people like you and I, there is too much risk of injury to really try to be doing that on a regular basis.
here is a picture that will never not be funny to me.
I always get a little chuckle out of my stats after I forgot to wear my watch for like half a day and since the computers don't really know how to determine if it was plugged up or not as far as the watch is concerned I have been siting in one place with no heartbeat at all of hours and hours.