According to a walking calorie calculator I used-
Weight 172lbs Distance walked 1 mile
Pace Duration Calories
Slow (2.5mph) 24 minutes 98
Normal (3mph) 20 minutes 96
Fast (3.5mph) 17 minutes 100
Very Fast (4mph) 15 minutes 102
Even though you burn more calories per minute the quicker you walk, walking slower takes a longer amount of time to travel the same distance so it equals roughly the same amount of calories burned?
Edit: thanks for your responses! I was aware running burns more calories per mile than walking the same distance due placing greater demands on the body/being far less efficient, I was specifically interested in walking speeds alone over the same distances?
Personal anecdote; I’ve managed to lose a significant amount of weight over the past 6 months walking 5 miles daily at a very brisk pace (4-4.5 mph average), today due to fatigue I took it easy, walked a lot slower at 3-3.5mph, felt less fatiguing but obviously took longer amount of time, a good trade off if it means I can walk at a more leisurely pace some days and burn roughly the same amount of calories over the same distance. 🙂
In: Physics
Total energy required to move a fix mass across fixed distance is the same. its simple physics.
However, your body does not use pure energy to move, it converts chemical energy into kinetic motion, this means a difference in efficiency.
The faster you are, the less efficient the system is to trade for more “instantaneous” energy. Raising heart rate, higher body temp, tenser muscles, all these kinetic motion burns energy, and at the end, you might be moving across the same distance, but you are spending more than double the energy.
Basically the process of losing weight is to make the body extremely inefficient, there by wasting a lot of energy.
Adding on to address your personal anecdote.
Your progress is amazing, but you’ll enjoy even greater progress when calorie burn is not the only metric that you consider.
Walks or workouts that feel “fatiguing” have greater overall benefit than walks or workouts that don’t, even though they burn roughly the same calories. Exertion improves your cardiovascular health, anaerobic capacity, muscle strength and more in ways that a relaxing walk doesn’t. The stronger and fitter you get in these areas, the more effective you’ll be in your next workout. So it snowballs until you’re able to burn even more calories in a single walk. And a year later, you’re now leaner and trimmer, plus your heart is fitter, your muscles are more toned, and your lungs work greater than ever.
Slightly unrelated to your question, but I commonly see the factually incorrect statement that walking a mile burns about the same number of calories as walking a mile.
When you are running, you are literally hurling the entire weight of your body off the ground one step at a time. Notice when you jog, you have both feet off the ground between steps? You are propelling your entire body weight off the ground with each step.
When you are walking, you are always connected to the ground and are leaning on one leg using “bone strength” to hold your whole body up with each step.
It’s a major difference. Jogging and running are biomechanically much less efficient than walking.
After nearly everybody compared **running** to walking in a question about **walking-vs-walking**, I googled and was maybe lucky.
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0486](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0486)
It has a paragraph about optimal speed; sorry but I can’t easily copy the formulas:
>(d) Optimal and preferred walking speeds are lower for shorter distances
>For the idealized bout of distance D (figure 1e), the energy-optimal walking speed vopt that minimizes Ebout(D,v) is given by the implicit function: (image) This metabolically optimal speed increases with distance D, approaching (image)for large distances (figure 2c).
>As predicted by the distance-dependence of optimal walking speeds, preferred human walking speeds in our experiment, both ‘average’ and ‘steady-state’ speeds, increased with distance (figure 2c). ‘Average’ preferred speed is the mean speed over the whole bout; a proxy for the ‘steady-state’ preferred speed is the mean over the bout’s middle 0.75 m (indistinguishable from averaging the middle 1.4 m). Model-predicted optimal speeds have a 0.96 correlation coefficient (Pearson’s) with experimental steady-state preferred speeds, which were within 1–2% optimal cost. Our subjects could accelerate to higher mean or steady-state speeds, but they preferred not to. Therefore, the time taken to accelerate–decelerate cannot explain lower speeds for shorter distances.
TL;DR: Walking fast is more energy efficient – probably up to the point where you feel comfortable if I understand it correctly.
For one: the calories you burn just to be alive get added to the totals. so it’s not just ‘how much energy to move this mass x distance’ but also ‘people at rest burn about a calory a minute’ (this is inaccurate but good enough for an approximation)
there is also a difference between walking and jogging/running. There is a funny passage in the science of discworld where kangaroos can’t exist because they burn less calories than they should when travelling.
this is because they absorb some of their downward momentum and use it to propel their next jump which means a hop actually is cheaper than when you calculate it as a normal step. Jogging is a similar process where the right gait will help carry your momentum forward without grounding/losing too much of your momentum . if you walk, especially the slower you walk, each step essentially ends your momentum and your leg has to carry the entire mass of your next step.
But then the faster you run, the more energy you have to provide which becomes inefficient. you can only get so much oxygen from your lungs and likely for sprinting you’ll get most of your energy from anaerobic rather than aerobic energy. Which is less efficient (and not something you can easily maintain)
that’s as much as I understand from it. this is wy despite someone running the same distance in 15 minutes, it costs more calories than if they had done it at a slow pace. less efficiency but also less time spent (so approx. 18 calories less burned, just by being alive) and likely less vertical momentum wasted.
sum all the benefits / downsides together and you get the outcome you see (well… that and these charts aren’t very accurate as a whole).
You burn slightly more the faster you push yourself due to our bodies deciding to grow more muscles afterwards to adapt to this new behaviour.
Also running is inefficient from an energy perspective (you get warm= proof of energyloss).
The heat is propbably from pushing blood at a higher flowrate through thin veins to your muscles.
You don’t care about calories, but your weight. Faster movement increases your breathing rate, and most of the weight “burned” is carbon dioxide literally leaving your body via breath – those molecules have *mass*, and that’s the weight difference that you see on scales. And, faster movement might also hasten your metabolism, which means you poop out a lot of carbon sooner, as well. You might have more water weight, though, because fast walking will make you sweat more and thus, drink more, which you could overcompensate with. But water is in constant, and quite rapid movement in body, anyway.
So faster movement is definitely better, since you flush out more literal grams of weight. If you don’t get aerobic (breathe harder), then the use is very little, though. So… jog.
From the physics side, it takes more energy for you to move faster, yes. Your muscles have to work harder so you’re burning more calories. BUT… things get interesting when you look at “Calories per hour” vs “Calories per *mile*”.
Your calories burned per mile mostly changes as you transition from walking to jogging. Walking is super energy efficient (about the only way to beat it is on a bike, which uses something like half as many calories and is much faster to boot).
[Harvard has this great table of energy usage by activity](https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/calories-burned-in-30-minutes-for-people-of-three-different-weights) (Calorie values shown are for 30 minutes of activity).
If you compare the 5 mph jogging speed (12 min/mile) to the 10 mph jogging speed (6 min/mile), it shows a 185 lb person using 336 Cal vs 671 Cal. Speed almost doubles, so Cal/30min also doubles. Makes sense, right? But if you convert those values to Cal/mile (multiply by 2 then divide by mph), *they’re exactly the same – 134 Cal/mile*. (For comparison, walking speeds burn closer to 90 Cal/mile). Similarly, walking at 3.5 vs 4 mph burns 91 vs 94 Cal/mile – not a notable difference.
Of course this is just an estimate and running form and efficiency play a role, but at the end of the day 1 mile is 1 mile. If your workout goal is a time then yeah a harder effort will burn more calories, but if your goal is a distance then speed really doesn’t matter. My 6 mile runs will all burn about the same calories regardless of whether it’s a speed workout or a recovery run. The same is (more or less) true for walking.
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