What is the difference between jogging and brisk walking? Walking or Jogging? which one is better?

 Walking or Jogging? which one is better?

SWhat is the difference between jogging and brisk walking?

You can walk briskly and still keep up with a jogger but the difference is in your feet – when jogging or running, one foot can leave the ground, with walking, one foot is touching the ground at all times. So as the heel of one foot begins to leave the ground, the toe of the other foot is touching it.

This is important because it’s this aspect of walking that makes it low-impact compared to jogging or running, even when it’s done at high speed.

Because your bodyweight is supported on whichever foot is touching the ground, there is no point where all your body weight is pushed down onto one leg with force (as is the case with jogging or running). Instead, your weight is more gently moved from one foot to the other, without a large impact.

One study, published in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, found that running produces a force on your joints that’s around 2.5 times your body weight, while walking produces a force of 1.2 times your body weight.

That’s a big difference if you consider you might be walking or jogging for several hours total each week. The same study, perhaps unsurprisingly, found that joggers or runners were far more likely to suffer with injuries than walkers too. 

Jogging vs walking: your heart rate

Jogging or running raises your heart rate to around 120-130 beats per minute (based on the average person), while walking at a brisk rate of around 100 steps per minute increases it to about 100 beats per minute.

This would lead you to assume that jogging would be better but, while jogging gets your heart working harder, walking also gets your heart into that ideal range – the 50-70% of your maximum heart rate. So both jogging and walking will improve your overall health and fitness.  

However, how fast and how long you ‘jog’ should also be considered. Research has recently indicated that running might not be as healthy as slower jogging or walking.

This, say researchers, might be because physically we are not adapted for long periods of intense exercise such as an hour-long run. As a result, a long fast run can result in Adrenalin increases and inflammation in your arteries can occur too.

This may explain why some studies have found that regular long and fast-paced running doesn't seem to hold the same benefits as slower jogging or walking.

For example, one study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that people who run most days at a pace faster than 7 miles per hour actually have the same risk of death as sedentary individuals. 

According to the researches, it has been proved that running burns double the number of calories as compared to that of walking.

The number of calories burned per mile is about 10 to 30 percent more while running than walking. For example, if a person weighs around 160 pounds, running at 5 miles per hour will burn up to 606 calories by running.

On the other hand, walking can burn only around 314 calories. Though some twerks can be made in order to match the number of calories burned by walking vs running.

Rather than walking normally, one can go for speed walking or power walking, which includes walking at a quite higher pace than usual, which in turns helps in losing more calories than normal walk.

Hope it helps!

Picture Source SAGA

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