So today I posted my daily walking miles on www.dailymile.com - where I always post them... I have a few online friends that also walk while they work, and we follow each other's progress on walking. Today I made a comment about bumping up my speed for walking & how I hoped to see an increase in calorie burn... Joan on there pointed out to me that it is not the case that I will burn more calories - that walking at a slower speed will burn more calories... I immediately took off my bodymedia armband to look at my burn data for the day - setting out to try to disprove her. But you know what? She was right... I was showing 24-30 calories less per hour of active walking when I was walking at 2.2 MPH vs the 2.0 that I was walking before... I was amazed!
She sent me to this online calculator - http://walking.about.com/library/cal/uccalc1.htm which shows that walking 2.0 vs 2.5 burns more calories - and she also explained a little bit of why it burns less calories at the faster speed - because of the built up momentum when you are walking faster - so it takes less kinetic energy to move your body at the faster speed.
Now this only seemed to pan out when I used the calculator for comparing walking my normal walking distance of 5 miles at 2.0 vs 2.5 vs 3.0 - when I used the 5 miles and put in 4.0 MPH the calorie burn went up. But I don't plan to walk much faster at my Trekdesk and still be able to manage to do my work.
So I will be taking my speed back to 2.0 and playing with the incline (as much as my foot can tolerate) to get a bit more of a burn (or to keep my body guessing...)
I was quite surprised when I read that a while back, that slower burns more calories too! It is interesting to see that the body media proved it too
ReplyDelete