Is walking still beneficial to a "runner"

My question is, as I become a more skilled and proficient runner, is walking as exercise still going to be beneficial to me?

Oh, I sure hope so.... I'm a fairly avid runner (run 3 days a week and run in half marathons), but also walk 10 to 20 miles a week as a little extra exercise! :happy:

Are people posting their responses based on opinion, personal experience, or scientific material? In a book I just finished "The Lure of Running" it seemed to imply too much walking isn't beneficial to running and you might as well jog.

All three.

Not beneficial how? It's not going to give you the adaptations that running would, but it certainly allows you to recover faster, especially for someone that isn't fit enough to run every day.

So if I run 45 miles a week and feel good, is there any reason I should choose to walk over run on any given day?

No. You answered your own question. You feel good. Run. At 45 miles a week, you should by now understand what your body is telling you. If you are very sore, like post marathon sore, then it would probably be a good time to take a day off from running. If you want to walk instead, that is certainly going to help with the blood flow and recovery and not put you at the risk potential that running on damaged legs would do.

But, you already knew that and you're just being contrary.

So given that I am a marathon runner who runs 45 miles a week and if I feel good on a particular day and choose to walk, is that going to benefit me much? Will it benefit me any less than someone who is a novice runner just getting started? This is what the OP is asking.

I ask this because I think about weight lifting, where if you can lift 50lb dumb bells fairly easily, lifting 10lb dumb bells seems a waste of your time. Is the same true for cardio? Once you've reached a certain level, is doing something much less strenuous than your norm doing anything for you fitness-wise?

Maybe a resident expert could speak to this point specifically. My opinion would be that cardio at a lower intensity is different than strength training at a lower weight since that's anaerobic. However, strength training at low weight and high reps becomes somewhat of a cardio routine.

That would depend on how often you want to exercise. If you are trying to get in some cardio most days of the week, I would say definitely incorporate some walking on your rest days from running. You don't want to run on consecutive days to give your muscles time to repair, and this makes for a great opportunity to walk. I am a beginning runner myself and this is what I do. I also do the walk/jog intervals.

If someone is healthy and is trained and has the endurance to run, I don't see how choosing to walk would provide any benefit. If you generally like walking and it makes you feel good mentally go for it. Or if you are burned out from running and looking for a very low intensity workout, that's fine to walk as well. Sometimes it isn't feasible to run because you aren't dressed appropriately and so on. But other than that, if you have the choice between running or walking, I think running is a much better use of your time. Walking beats sitting though.

Activity is good in any form. Running everyday can be hard on the body. The body also gets used to a workout, so changing it up sometimes is good. Walking is not just for the unfit people. You don't have to workout at full tilt all the time.

First of all, you have to define "workout". Then you have to define "benefits".

If the goal is to just burn calories, then the answer is "yes, you will get benefits from walking because you will burn a few more calories than you would have sitting in a chair".

If the goal is to improve or maintain fitness, then the answer is "maybe". It depends on your fitness level. If the intensity stimulus of an exercise does not meet a certain threshold (e.g. 50% of VO2 max), then you will not get much in the way of "fitness" benefits--that is, you will not increase your cardiovascular fitness level by doing the activity.

A trained runner who runs at 7-8 mph will not get any fitness benefits from walking 3 mph.

There are also general health benefits that accrue from being active, but those are mostly in comparison with a sedentary individual.

As to your last statement--just randomly changing activities is not going to provide fitness benefits unless the intensity is within your training range. Unless you run really, really slow and can walk really, really fast and are on a hilly course, if you are in a "rut" from running, leisurely walking is not going to help.

Now walking on an incline or on a treadmill with an incline feature is a different story. That can be a very helpful alternate workout--but that's only because you can set the workload to be in the same training intensity range (or close to it) as your usual exercise. The same could be said for cycling, rowing, stairclimbing--as long as you can work at the lower end of your training range.

Are people posting their responses based on opinion, personal experience, or scientific material? In a book I just finished "The Lure of Running" it seemed to imply too much walking isn't beneficial to running and you might as well jog.

All three.

Not beneficial how? It's not going to give you the adaptations that running would, but it certainly allows you to recover faster, especially for someone that isn't fit enough to run every day.

So if I run 45 miles a week and feel good, is there any reason I should choose to walk over run on any given day?

I run 6 days a week and walk for 90 mins on Sundays pulling my daughter in her wagon. I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons runners chose to walk too.

What benefit do you get? You get the benefit of recovery. You get increased blood flow to the muscles used when running which helps to repair the micro-tears in the tissue. Also, if you walk fast enough, you get your heart rate into the fat burning range at the very least. It's really not that hard to get into that range.

So you can't get these benefits by running slow?

It's not either/or. It's not binary. Sometimes I run. Sometimes I walk. I run for 30-40 minutes. Sometimes I walk for an hour or two. Sometimes I ride the bike. Sometimes...