There’s been a long debate as to whether walking or running is better for your fitness as wellbeing, and research is beginning to emerge that sheds light on the issue. So which is better? In short, it depends almost completely on what you are hoping to accomplish.
For weight loss, running reigns supreme. The study “Greater Weight Loss from Running than Walking,” – published last month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise – found, as you may have guessed, that runners maintained their body mass and waistlines far better than the walkers. The researchers evaluated survey data from 15,237 walkers and 32,215 runners enrolled in the National Runners and Walkers Health Study, asking participants about their weight, waist circumference, diets and typical weekly walking or running mileage both when they joined the study, and then again up to six years later.
However, for other measures of wellness, new research has found that walking can be at least as valuable as running — and in some instances, more so. Again combing from the Runners and Walkers Health Study, a new study published this month found that runners and walkers had equally diminished risks of developing age-related cataracts compared with sedentary people.
More research, this time published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology and likewise using numbers from the versatile Runners and Walkers Health Study, found that while runners had far less risk of high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol profiles, diabetes and heart disease than their sedentary peers, walkers fared even better. With regard to heart disease, for instance, runners who ran an hour a day reduced their risk by 4.5%, but walkers who expended the same amount of energy per day reduced their risk of heart disease by more than 9%.
‘It’s fair to say that, if you plan to expend the same energy walking as running, you have to walk about one and a half times as far and that it takes about twice as long,’ says Paul T. Williams, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the lead author of all of the studies involving the surveys of runners and walkers. ‘It bears repeating that either walking or running is healthier than not doing either.’