There's Running, and Then There's Running
Running is considered a high-impact aerobic fitness activity. But as with any sport, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. If your idea of running is a slow jog, you're not going to burn as many calories as you would if you were to maintain a fast-paced sprint for the same distance. How fast your heart beats, how fast your pulse races, how fast and how wide your arms swing, and the intensity and force of your stride determine how many calories you burn. So, for that matter, does your weight.
Debunking a Myth
A common rule of thumb over the years is that for the average person, running burns about 100 calories per mile--and that since walking requires moving the same body weight over the same distance, speed really isn't a factor. Run a mile, walk a mile--you're burning off the same number of calories.
In her article, "How Many Calories Are You Really Burning?," Amby Burfoot debunks that myth. According to the article, published in the August 2004 issue of Runners World magazine, a study by a group of Syracuse University researchers measured how many calories a group of 12 men and 12 women burned running and walking a mile on a treadmill. The men burned an average of 124 calories when they ran, but just 88 calories when they walked. The women burned 105 calories when they ran and 74 calories when they walked.
The discrepancy between the men and the women was easy enough to figure out, Burfoot wrote: The men burned more calories than the women because they weighed more, and thus had to exert more energy to move their additional weight. As for running versus walking, Burfoot puts it this way: "When you walk, you keep your legs mostly straight, and your center of gravity rides along fairly smoothly on top of your legs. In running, we actually jump from one foot to the other....This continual rise and fall of our weight requires a tremendous amount of Newtonian force on both takeoff and landing," which results in a higher caloric burn.
Calculating Your Own Caloric Burn
Run the Planet is a website that bills itself as a "resource for runners." Click the link below, under references, to access the site's running calculator. It will give you an approximate caloric burn based on distance or speed, factoring in your weight.
Say you weigh 186 pounds and run one mile. According to the calorie counter that measures your caloric burn by distance, you're going to burn 121 calories.
But as Burfoot's article showed, any measurement by distance alone can be misleading, since the higher the speed, the higher the caloric burn.
Let's try the calculator again, this time calculating your caloric burn by speed. Let's assume you run a 10-minute mile. That's six miles per hour. Enter that number into the calorie counter, assuming the same weight, and you're at 139 calories burned per mile.
At 12 miles per hour, you're burning 153 calories per mile.
So next time you decide to go for a run, keep in mind that the faster you go and the more exaggerated your movements are, the more calories you're going to burn.
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