IOL Strength and Conditioning

Is it your understanding moving your body by foot over a mile distance will burn up just under a hundred calories? Isn’t that what we’ve always been told, whether running or walking, covering a mile clocks between 98 and 104 calories?

I’ve heard those figures given at least a dozen times in lectures over the past twenty years. It never made any sense and every time had me scratching my head, but given the authority behind the statements, I found myself repeating the 100-calories-per-mile average throughout my time in the gym business.

Apparently all that credulity was strained for a reason: According to Dr. David Swain, author of Exercise Prescription: A Case Study Approach to the ACSM Guidelines, calorie expenditure while walking at a 17-minute-per-mile pace burns 3.3 calories per minute on top of resting, while running at about twice that pace burns about twice as many calories, and if the person works the same duration covering twice the distance, he or she gains a fourfold greater caloric expenditure.

In his article Interval Training, HIIT or Miss, Mike Boyle writes,

“Further evidence for the superiority of higher intensity work can be found in the September/October 2006 issue of the ACSM Journal. Dr. David Swain stated running burns twice as many calories as walking. This is great news for those who want to lose body fat. I am not a running advocate, but we can put to rest another high intensity (running) versus low intensity (walking) debate.

“Do the math. Swain states that a 136-pound person walking will burn 50 calories per mile and proportionally more as the subject’s weight increases. In other words, a 163-pound person, weighing 20 percent more, would burn 20 percent more calories. This means that expenditure goes from 50 to 60 calories, also a 20-percent increase. Swain goes on to state that running at seven miles per hour burns twice as many calories as walking at four mph. This means a runner would burn 100 calories in roughly eight and one half minutes or about 11 calories a minute. The walker at four miles per hour would burn 50 calories in 15 minutes (the time it would take to walk a mile at four miles per hour). That’s less than four calories per minute of exercise.”

The study Mike’s referring to was done to determine whether moderate or vigorous exercise was better for improving cardiovascular fitness, which seems like a no-brainer and barely worth a second look, but the striking point was how this turns the mileage debate upside-down.

This doesn’t mean many of us should trot out the door and head out on a run, because the truth is, most of us aren’t built for running; we’re too heavy to be good at it, or our joints aren’t acclimated for it, or, in the case of women, there’s likely to be hip or knee issues that make running sub-optimal.

How about if we swap that joint-destruction for some harder work on an incline? What about pulling something, pushing or dragging and, heck, let’s add a weight vest and traverse the hills while we’re at it.

If the point is intensity, we can provide that without the impact of running, and if we can work harder, longer—and this is separate from the discussion of interval work, which you should read and consider in Mike’s thorough article—we can gain cardiovascular improvement at the same time as we burn more calories.

Here’s a truth; see if you don’t see a little of yourself in this one: When we first start doing regular cardio for a purpose, we’re not very good at it; it hurts, we hate it and head back to the weight room in a hurry. No more of that! It’s boring, and cardio’s for wimps. Isn’t that what most of us settle on?

We sell ourselves a lie, because it’s easier to hate cardio for life than go through the pain of the conditioning phase. It’s a lesson we’d best re-teach ourselves, to learn a better version of the truth.

Take home message: Work your cardio a littler harder, a little longer and a little more often.