Running vs walking — which one is scientifically going to get you in shape?

If you believe that running, say, five miles would burn more energy (calories or kilojoules) than walking, you’d be right. But, HeadUp Labs has found that there’s more to the story.

Ordinarily, the story goes something like this: if you weigh 160 pounds (72.5 kilograms) and walk five miles at a speed of 4.1 miles per hour, then you’ll burn around 480 calories (2000 kilojoules). If you dialled up the speed and ran those five miles at a speed of eight miles per hour, then you’d burn over 650 calories (2720 kilojoules). The lesson here seems like running outperforms walking… but, there’s a twist.

Who wins in the long run? 

HeadUp Labs collate a lot of data, plus has an exceptional team of data scientists to analyse the billions of living, breathing, running, walking, sitting days of real people’s lives — people who are just like you. We can see beyond the theoretical numbers like those above and dive a lot deeper. Here’s the first surprise that we’ve unveiled: it’s the people who are walkers that burn more energy. The reason? Because they walk more, and they do it more often.

People who, on the surface, love to wear Spandex in their spare time, put all and any activity on Strava, and take selfies in the gym are generally younger, and therefore tend to be healthier. They also have more flexibility when it comes to scheduling intense cardio, and while they thrive on sweaty physical activity, statistically, they only do that on certain days of the week (our data indicates three days on average).

What about the walkers? Well, our numbers show that people who walk tend to do it more often — about 6-7 days per week on average.

Our Converge App helps increase your steps

The average person living in your city or town today will only take around 3,000 steps per day. Once they start using the Converge App, the platform helps them:

1. Slowly dial up their activity, and shows them what impact physical activity is having on their mood, their sleep and their heart health.
2. Reframe the role that physical activity has on their life. They effectively ‘reprice’ or re-evaluate it because they finally have the information that they need to understand it. So, in turn, they do more of it.

On average, our users increase their steps to 11,870 steps per day — and, in case you’re wondering, that’s 5.1 miles or 8.2 kilometres.

Here’s the other kicker. This change in exercise habits isn’t just applicable to the young, fit, already healthy population. It’s for everybody. In fact, the people who modify their behaviour quickest are predominantly skewed towards females aged around 50. People who do what exercise specialists term ‘low impact exercise’:

1. Cover the most ground, 
2. burn the most calories, 
3. lose the most weight, and 
4. achieve the greatest health traffic light improvements.

Why? Because they do what they do pretty much every single day.

Whichever metric you use, when you calculate the impact over months of walking six to seven days per week versus running three times per week, the result becomes clear. And if mathematics isn’t your thing, then just remember the story of the tortoise and the hare!

Converge Move

You’re more likely to complete a goal if other people are doing it with you. Converge Move is a fun, team-based, physical activity challenge that’s guaranteed to get your people connected and on the path to good health using the Converge App. One six-week Move challenge is completely free to Converge customers during the first 12 months, following the release of the Converge App.

Learn more about Converge Move.