Slow walking burns more calories. (Horray for the rest of us

That was very very interesting.... made sense too, in that slower walking takes away one's momentum, thereby causing one to actually burn more calories than a brisk walk..... hmmmmm

And yeah it's okay for us who weigh less, too. For instance, if I (who weighs 112) walked for 15 minutes after lunch and scaled a mile, I'd burn roughly 64 calories. Nice. (Note: weight more, burn more.)



http://walking.about.com/od/weightloss/a/slowwalk0605.htm

Then you'd be going 4mph though, which is too fast according to this article...according to this, you'd have to take 30 min. to walk one mile in order to burn more calories. I'd have to look at the controls of that study to see what the people were doing, exactly. You might have to lunge the whole way to walk that slowly. :laugh:

Thinking... hmmmmmmm..

I wonder if anyone has done a study of how many calories (how efficient you beat) you burn per heart beat?

If you could get close (say to a hundredth or a thousandth), and you kept track of how many beats, you would have pretty efficient way to measure your calories burnt in a day!

That would be pretty darn interesting! It would cover sleeping, stress, cooling (or heating) your body in heat (cold), exercise, recovery, etc!!!

I think that study is silly.

The 3 mile per hour walker will burn more calories in a half hour than a 2 mile walker will. What's more important I think is how many calories you burn in 1/2 hour doing a similar excercise. How much you burn per mile is not that relevant to me as I am more concerned with the time it takes not the distance covered.

Take it to the ridiculous extreme, how many calories would you burn if it took you 8 hours to walk a mile?. Much more per mile than the faster walkers. However, I ain't planing on walking that slow anytime soon.

I agree!

I agree with FrankP, I don't want to take 3 hours to get my miles in, or steps or whatever form of tracking I may be using. 10,000 steps a day is recommended and I can get that in about 52 minutes doing intervals with running and walking on the treadmill, the quicker the better, not to mention I feel great when I am done.

If I wanted to walk slow I would go to the mall at Christmas time and walk behind all the rest of the herd!

Maybe I am in a time crunch and want the get the most bang for my buck, so to speak!


Created by MyFitnessPal.com - Free Calorie Counter

Thinking... hmmmmmmm..

I wonder if anyone has done a study of how many calories (how efficient you beat) you burn per heart beat?

If you could get close (say to a hundredth or a thousandth), and you kept track of how many beats, you would have pretty efficient way to measure your calories burnt in a day!

That would be pretty darn interesting! It would cover sleeping, stress, cooling (or heating) your body in heat (cold), exercise, recovery, etc!!!

That would vary between each person...you really can't create corellational values because it even varies in one individual. It depends on your heart size compared to your body size, how fast your heart is beating, how conditioned you are, how many stimulants/depressants you've ingested...it's just not stable enough to study. To find out, they'd probably have to do something like shut off all of your other basal bodily functions (lungs, brain) and measure your RMR while you were still alive. Your heart beat is just a tiny portion of the calories needed to sustain your life. Your brain is the big 'gas guzzler'...it accounts for about 20% of your RMR needs.

This article was good on the original topic - Running vs Walking -

http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-242-304-311-8402-0,00.html

that's a great article tim. Too bad I can't walk a 6.5 minute mile or I would considering how many calories it would burn. :happy:

~laughing~

6.5 is my running goal! Though I wont be able to repeat the 22 to 25 yo days of 3miles for the Marine Corps PFT in under 18 minutes. My best was 17:45.

What do you think Banks? Any correlation per an individuals heart beat vs calories? Think its linear or exponential or impossible to determine because it changes too quickly with the cardioshape of the person?

That would vary between each person...you really can't create corellational values because it even varies in one individual. It depends on your heart size compared to your body size, how fast your heart is beating, how conditioned you are, how many stimulants/depressants you've ingested...it's just not stable enough to study. To find out, they'd probably have to do something like shut off all of your other basal bodily functions (lungs, brain) and measure your RMR while you were still alive. Your heart beat is just a tiny portion of the calories needed to sustain your life. Your brain is the big 'gas guzzler'...it accounts for about 20% of your RMR needs.

I know it would differ between people, but I bet its pretty consistent to that person (at least short term).

It would almost be a constant (consistent to that individual) that might vary depending on cardio load.

But your heart is like the pistons in a car. No matter if you had the AC on, or the gas pedal floored, as things needed to burn more energy, the piston would have to increase to cover the load. So its not necessarily the heart using more calories, its in relation to the heart beating to how many calories being used!

Well I found an estimate on how much of our BMR goes to powering the heart, but nothing on calories per beat. The heart isn't like a piston, though, since stroke volume varies and so does the power and speed of each beat. More power requires more ATP, with each molecule releasing 7.3 calories. Here's the study though. Looks as though heart failure patients require 17% less energy to meet RMR needs, so we can assume the heart might use around that much energy per day.

Daily energy requirements in heart failure patients.
Toth MJ, Gottlieb SS, Fisher ML, Poehlman ET.

Department of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA.

Diminished body cell mass in heart failure patients contributes to poor prognosis and decreased quality of life. The level of daily energy intake needed to maintain body cell mass and optimal physiological function in heart failure patients is unknown. Thus, we examined daily energy expenditure in free-living heart failure patients to estimate daily energy requirements. Daily energy expenditure (doubly labeled water) and its components (resting and physical activity energy expenditures) were measured in 26 heart failure patients (25 men and one woman aged 69 +/- 7 years) and 50 healthy controls (48 men and two women aged 69 +/- 6 years). Resting energy expenditure was measured by indirect calorimetry; physical activity energy expenditure from the difference between daily and resting energy expenditure; body composition by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry; leisure time physical activity from a questionnaire; and peak oxygen consumption ([peak VO2] n = 16 heart failure patients) from a treadmill test to exhaustion. Plasma markers of nutritional status were also considered. Daily energy expenditure was 17% lower (2,110 +/- 500 v 2,543 +/- 449 kcal/d) and physical activity energy expenditure 54% lower (333 +/- 345 v 728 +/- 374 kcal/d) in heart failure patients compared with healthy controls. Daily energy expenditure was related to physical activity energy expenditure (r = .79, P < .01), resting energy expenditure (r = .63, P < .01), leisure time physical activity (r = .63, P < .01), and peak VO2 (r = .58, P < .01) in heart failure patients. Stepwise regression analysis showed that daily energy requirements in heart failure patients were best estimated by a combination of resting energy expenditure and reported leisure time physical activity (total R2 = 61%; standard error of the estimate, +/- 333 kcal/d). Daily energy requirements predicted from equations derived in healthy elderly were inaccurate when applied to heart failure patients, deviating -10% to +30% from measured daily energy expenditure. We conclude that despite low levels of activity, markers of physical activity predicted daily energy needs in heart failure patients. We provide a new equation to estimate energy needs in free-living heart failure patients based on measurements of daily energy expenditure.

Here is a REALLY nice calculator of calories used in a day!

I like the variables its asking for!

http://www.dietitian.com/calcbody.php

Yea, I know there has to bean estimate, because that's the premise behind HRM that count calories. I have looked on the Polar website and others like it (I have the F11) and although I've found that they use weight, % MHR, RHR, and time.

Well I found something. I found several different values for the power of the heart in watts, and the average came to 2.3. I found a watt-calorie converter and come up with 1891 calories, or 1.9 kcalories (which is what we use as food calories), per hour. So, at rest, our heart might burn 45.6 calories a day pumping the regular 4-5 liters per minute. At 70 BPM with 1440 minutes in a day, that's about 100,800 beats a day and 4.5^-4 kcalories per beat.

Whew. I hate math.

I like it! ~smiling~

So do you think its linear ( as your heart rate beats, a person will have a unique calories used per beat? Or do you think it goes up as you do something that raises your heart beat?)

Yea, I know there has to bean estimate, because that's the premise behind HRM that count calories. I have looked on the Polar website and others like it (I have the F11) and although I've found that they use weight, % MHR, RHR, and time.

Well I found something. I found several different values for the power of the heart in watts, and the average came to 2.3. I found a watt-calorie converter and come up with 1891 calories, or 1.9 kcalories (which is what we use as food calories), per hour. So, at rest, our heart might burn 45.6 calories a day pumping the regular 4-5 liters per minute. At 70 BPM with 1440 minutes in a day, that's about 100,800 beats a day and 4.5^-4 kcalories per beat.

Whew. I hate math.

I like it! ~smiling~

So do you think its linear ( as your heart rate beats, a person will have a unique calories used per beat? Or do you think it goes up as you do something that raises your heart beat?)

Both...each person has a different metabolic rate and their organs will use different amounts of calories. A larger heart will require more calories, so a small female's heart would use less than yours does. Energy needs of all tissues increase with increased workload, so the cals per beat would increase if you needed a more powerful beat. The average wattage of a heart is 2.3, but the sources I checked listed anything from 1.3 to 5. That value of 4.5^-4 calories would only apply to an individual with a RHR of 70 bpm and a perfectly average-sized heart during rest.

If you actually looked at the calculator the article gave you then you'd understand more what it was talking about. People can walk "slower" upwards or downwards of 4mph at varying speeds at different heights and weights.

Anyway...don't be a wet blanket.

I did read the article and was SUPPORTING your theory! (based on walking would USE more calories)

But it is raining a lot, so I would be wet if I was a blanket!

However, If I only had 30 minutes in the day to BURN calories, I would choose running 7 to 8 miles per minutes and you would never catch me walking in your articles theory!