I've been trying out a bunch of different ways of exercising just to keep things fresh in my life. I get bored very easily and one thing I have to make sure that I do in order to insure that I continue to exercise is I gotta mix things up.
This is why you will see me do a wide variety of exercise sports such as cycling, running, and also swimming. I do group sports every now and then but I don't really attempt to figure out how much this burns, I just play like a normal human.
I'm not trying to be the best, I just like to know some information. Recently I stumbled upon some information in an article that suggested that it is distance, not how quickly you complete that distance, that determines how many calories your body burns. The idea being that it takes the same amount of energy to move a certain distance and whether your run the entire thing or walk it, isn't going to make that much of a difference. I didn't believe this article when I read it because in my mind I am thinking "how can that possibly be true when running feels so much more taxing than walking?"
So I decided to do some tests.
This time I decided to do a 10k distance where I alternate between running 1 kilometer, and walking the next. I do this over and over until I have gone a full 10km.
There's the information and the only thing you need to really pay attention to is the active calories because the total calories is determined by your natural metabolism plus the extra calories burned by the activity. Your metabolism is just how many calories you burn by simply being alive and this would be the same whether you are running or sitting on the sofa. Therefore it doesn't really count and is in there just to make you feel better about your activities, i guess.
There's my heart rate and it isn't very difficult to figure out which parts I was running and which parts I was walking.
My pace matches up exactly with that information outside of the one deep dip at the end where I was waiting to cross the street.
This is just another way of looking at the same information and as can see my walking pace is roughly 10 mins per km and my jogging pace is roughly 6-7 minutes per km. This is actually a bit faster than my normal pace for runs where I am doing ONLY running because I know I will get to rest in 1km, not 5.
This last bit of information is something I don't really know what to do with but find it amusing that the app seems to think that I should rest for nearly 100 hours before attempting something like this again. That seems excessive to me.
So here's the deal, when I ran a distance of 5km I burned just over 400 calories. Next, I half ran half walked a 5km immediately after that initial 5k and burned just over 400 more calories.
Now that I did 10km and alternated between running and walking, it appears as though the result is about the same but about 33 calories LESS than if I had done it the other way.
Unless I am forgetting how to math in my older age, this represents a mere 4% decrease in caloric burn compared to a full on run and therefore I am just going to say that it is within an acceptable margin of error so I'm just going to say that they are, in fact, the same.
For me, a couple of things are more beneficial about alternating 1 fast 1 slow: For one thing I am more inclined to actually go further on my run if I know that every km I am going to get to rest, it's just so much less taxing on my body to do it that way. Also, because of that rest I am actually running at a faster pace than I normally would do if I was planning on doing the full 5km running. I probably could run a 5k at 6 mins per km, but it is going to be extremely difficult for me. Doing a 10k where I only run 5 of the km's was actually quite easy. I ranked it as a "moderate" level of exercise even though I was going quite fast by my standards on all the km's that I was jogging.
So you can go ahead and take this as you will but to me this is actually pretty fantastic news. I have gotten to the point where I was starting to kind of loathe leaving the house to run a 5k whereas a half/half run/walk is something that I kind of look forward to.
In the end it is extremely important to me that I don't hate the exercise that I do because I am much more likely to do the exercise if it isn't really painful.
So based on my research, it doesn't seem to really matter how you tackle a 5k or a 10k, you end up burning the same amount of calories.
Next I will test individual km's with separate recordings of each.