Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking?
joehxblog.com
joehxblog.com
It shows that in contrast to most animals, the efficiency curve of humans for running speeds is extremely flat, ie, we are about equally efficient at many different speeds, while the kind of game that we hunted was not.
The discrepancy allowed us to find a speed where we could exhaust the animal after 10-30km (as I understand) provided we were also excellent trackers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03052.epdf?sharing_tok...
Might explain why we aren't all musclebound and huge? Although I'm sure food availability had more influence.
Endurance advantage is a big factor in many sports and offers a viable strategy.
The issue with your suggestion is that it's not uncommon for massive heavy athletes to also have excellent endurance too, so even if they may not catch you, they would still be the one stalking you.
He would just sit down and try to stay awake longer than you and then bop you on the head.
My friend realized before the match that just holding the gloves up and swinging punches is more tiring than you'd think. So the strategy he settled on was to just put his guard up and not attack at all. He let his friend take a bunch of swings at him until eventually the poor guy was literally too tired to hold his arms up. Then my friend started swinging and quickly won.
Absolutely a successful strategy.
Lightly-armed Athenians trapped heavily-armed Spartans in hilly terrain, and instead of fighting them in a phalanx, wore them down with a long day of hit-and-run. Hundreds of exhausted Spartans were taken alive, which was a massive scandal for the Spartan reputation at the time.
The Rock, being human is able to exhaust at least as much heat as you, taking away from your advantage.
I'm not so sure about this. The Rock has only slightly more surface area than I do (due to his larger physical size); it's not a huge amount more, certainly not double. However, he has much more muscle mass than I do, probably more than double. Therefore, his surface-area/muscle-mass ratio should be lower, meaning he should have less ability to exhaust heat than me. (Muscle mass is what generates all the heat.) Therefore, over time, he should get overheated more quickly than me, though of course this depends entirely on our relative physical activity while we're trying to fight or avoid the other.
So, anecdotally, yeah, me vs a runner and the runner takes off? If I don't catch them within a couple of hundred yards, they're gone. I can walk or cycle at a medium pace all day, but distance runners will beat me in marathons every single time. In caveman times I'd have been the closer, the guy who catches up to the runners and finishes off the bear or tiger or elephant when it's exhausted.
The biggest most muscular individuals rarely make it through training eval.
Even though you need to run with 70lb rucksack, it’s typically the fit & trim person (lighter body weight) who succeeds.
If you were of similar size then yes. Basically being smaller really sucks in a fight. So if you can reasonably deflect the Rocks wrestling & grappling offensive you could rope a dope him causing him to gas out and then win. Higher weight MMA fighters & boxers use this tactic all the time. They let their opponent “punch themselves out” and then get off their own offense.
The same way if you lie in bed for a month you're not going to be doing 20 hour hikes either.
Fitness isn't a one-dimensional thing -- our muscles adapt efficiently to our specific activities and only our specific activities.
So comparing the efficiency of walking and running only makes sense for someone who is already well-adapted to both.
Training increases what that pace is, but ultimately no (land?) mammal can exceed their aerobic threshold for long, since there are limits to stored oxygen. Cetaceans and pinnipeds might be an interesting exception.
That said, I remember doing similar 'runs to the parking lot' and being gassed when I was totally untrained despite being capable of long walks/hikes. I suspect there are even more basic adaptations one needs to be able to do these very short activities for which a more trained individual can complete anaerobically.
I say this as someone incredibly out of shape, but I doubt any of those people are wiped out by running to the bus stop ;)
> I suspect there are even more basic adaptations one needs to be able to do these very short activities for which a more trained individual can complete anaerobically.
Yeah absolutely, I found it very interesting that weight training is universal in sprinters, it makes sense as metabolic training as well as the actual muscle growth.
Adding distance/time into your program is probably going to help, as long as you don't feel too tired/sore or that you're over-training
Consider adding interval training to your regime. That's a more time efficient way of improving your VO2MAX (which should translate to your overall performance). E.g. 1-2 minutes 90%-100%, 1-2 minutes walk/slow/jog, x3-5 (this is rough, do some reading and see what works for you).
When biking, it really doesn't help that I have some silly hills surrounding the house. Even if I'm not going all out, a 10% climb takes its toll.
Now that you've recognized how gentle a low heartrate feels I'm sure a conversational pace is totally adequate for staying under your lactic threshold (but if you could sing you're going too slow!)
For a beginner a good tip is just to go a little bit easier than they think they should be going. Once you've built some sort of aerobic base your training should start including intervals and runs that push you harder.
There are two risks in pushing yourself too hard. Injury and over-training.
EDIT: another thing I didn't mention is that in terms of injury you want to give your body plenty of time to build more distance. Most of your joints and other tissues take longer to adapt than cardiovascular. I think this is where people can get into potential injury situations by ramping up too fast. I personally also try to run on soft surfaces (trails etc.) since I find hard surfaces (roads) a lot more punishing.
I pretty much settled on what all they were saying. I was taking the exact path you outlined. Since that seems to be working fine for me, and I'm also adding weights, I figured I would wait and try again later. Probably in a year or so, if I can keep up this schedule. Good luck on your exercise!
My heart rate goes down way faster, so if I stop for 1 second (literally), my heart rate drops immediately and it takes a lot of effort for it to go back up.
I suspect at this point training in zone 2 is trivial, my body gets naturally there
TL; DR; train hard first, your heart gets stronger and brings you to zone 2 naturally?
I'm no athlete or expert, so please do your research and ignore everything I said
I did horse riding for a bit, that is not true. There is a lot of speed ranges you can choose from
The linked paper in the parent comment has a graph on page 347 (page 2 of the content). The human's walk curve is substantially more efficient than the other gaits, included on the graph, which is the point I was trying to make. Humans best their caloric/distance ratios over time ("endurance hunting").
Horses have more than two speeds. They can walk, trot, gait, gallup.
> Although not extensively studied in non-humans, endurance running is unique to humans among primates, and uncommon among quadrupedal mammals other than social carnivores (such as dogs and hyenas) and migratory ungulates (such as wildebeest and horses)
Anyway I was attempting a clumsy metaphor to aid someone's understanding, not trying to be pedantic. It's easiest to compare sprinting and not-sprinting.
Being naked helps a lot too.
The mental model in my head sort of accounts for effort it takes just to be upright for 10 hours even if you don't cover any distance at all. Low-effort running saves me half of that energy because I spend less time upright.
Your body can be thought of as a directed graph of different pools of energy with different edge weights representing how fast you can move energy between pools, and your fitness as being your ability to move energy into the ATP pool. If you can walk a km in 10 minutes for 200 kj, or run it in 5 minutes for 200 kj, and you can produce 300 kj of ATP in 10 minutes, then you're going to run out of energy running but be able to walk indefinitely, even though both are equally efficient. (In practice the numbers are going to be different, and there are more conversions than just glucose to ATP to think about, but I think the example illustrates the point).
I have found it to be more efficient than mindless hiking/walking. I try to loosen my gaite and keep upright when I remember to.
Also, having done extensive Taibata, squats, weight lifting, and cycling. Nothing compared to hiking (often steep terrain) for conditioning. I'm strong from the inside out and it (strength) persists for much longer than other conditioning exercises. And it's crazy enjoyable. Cycling was enjoyable (and far more painful overall) but it guarantees nothing for core strength and will typically result in repetition injuries (years of experience MTB and road).
you are probably not trained as well as our ancestors, who were consistently jog-hunting since very young ages, which translates to more efficient mind-body connection, target muscles and energy systems development, and fat to body mass ratio.
There are plenty of people who can jog for many miles and likely has higher aerobic threshold for moderate sprinting.
This is easy to observe for dog lovers. Walk with a medium size (say 50-60 lbs) dog off leash and you'll notice the dog has to choose between a gait that's a little slow for a human walk or a gait that'd be a fast walk for a human -- but you can still match either of those without much trouble. If you choose not to match your walk to the dog's speed, the dog will alternate between the two gaits to roughly match your speed.
There is this related saying that „the fastest marathoners burn just as much calories as the slowest to complete 42km, they just do it in a much shorter time“. This kind of range is not available to walking.
However, it's possible for a human to match speeds with the same base gait, whereas the dog gaits seem more limited to their narrow ideal speeds.
I hike a lot and started running races in alpine territory (e.g. this one [1]) about a decade ago and think if you take into account fatigue (mental, muscle, tendons) and exposure to the elements (sun, rain, wind, snow), a light running pace can definitely make you arrive at your destination less exhausted than walking the same distance, given that you can move confidently in the given terrain.
So it is a multi-dimensional optimization problem (as opposed to only optimizing for energy expenditure) and very dependent on how comfortably you can move at the given velocities.
You are are not as long in the sun but you are longer in the sun under a less efficient energy expenditure. You will sweat more because your are not in an ideal window.
If you look at the Ultra events with 100+ Miles and tons of elevation gain, even the winners have an avg pace of a fast walking speed. There are some hikers who only hiked these events and got very good results.
The more you weight the further the efficiency goes away. Even the top runners only walk the steep uphills. And in long races with lots of elevation gain at the and they are walking all hills. It's exactly because it becomes so inefficient even for lightweights
Sorry, but this is totally incorrect. The record for the Western States 100, which has nearly 19,000' of elevation gain, is just over 14hrs for men, and about 15.5hrs for women.
Fast hiking in that terrain would be 4mph which translates to 25hrs minimum.
The world's best ultra runners can maintain 6+mph average in insane terrain.
Tor des Géants (78,700' over 205 mi) men's record is 66:44 at just over 3 mph and that doesn't touch the Barkley marathon with 60,000' gain and under 2mph, though that's more to do with the rough terrain than elevation.
190' per mile isn't that much, especially since the Western 100 ends 5,000' lower than it starts.
"Tons" is subjective, but their statement is objectively true for a bunch of ultra marathons - Tor des Géants and Barkley were just the ones of the top of my head. He is not "totally incorrect" as you said.
3mph at Tor des Géants means running at every runnable segment.
Then again the opposite example (lets say a super hot desert with intense sun - but you can wear a shaded hat or something) might result in the opposite - your feet might still be more tired because walking is slower (and more time on them) but the environment is a huge factor.
If I'm wrong about that, at least it's obviously easier to run downhill. When walking, it can even take more effort vs flat. But when running, by definition both feet leave the ground at some points, so you have less friction and can let gravity do its thing.
What makes you think that it is „bad“?
From my experience of roughly analysing this a couple of years ago when I was losing quite a lot of weight, I drew two main conclusions:
* Calories used is a function of total distance travelled and your weight, your speed isn't really that significant a factor.
* Walking rather than running uses about 80% of the calories for the same distance compared to running. It seems to be based on the mechanics of changing gait. If you at walking speed (google MAF - maximum aerobic fitness for more info), you use more calories than just walking.
While these would seem to be opposite to the conclusions in the article, it's worth noting that the MET value is a function of calories over time, not calories over distance. The faster you're moving, the more calories you're using and the greater the distance you're covering, and they roughly cancel out.
I also found it interesting that running slowly and/or walking is better for losing weight as running faster primarily uses glycogen (and makes you hungry), and running slowly primarily uses fat. This doesn't really affect energy efficiency, per se, but fat is a more efficient energy storage source, so this might be relevant in answering the posed question. But in any case, if you want to lose weight, walking is significantly more useful than running as you can generally sustain the activity over a longer period of time, and with less stress on your body.
...but if you want the most efficient way to travel only with the power of your own muscles, you need a bicycle :)
Riding is much more fun, but I suspect you are completely right about walking being the better choice for weight loss. I was at my leanest when my breakfast was just black coffee and it was followed by a 60-90 minute walk.
The great thing about walking is that you can just keep doing it mindlessly, while also doing other things such as commuting, shopping, running errands and taking care of the dogs, which you need to do anyway. The inefficiency, compared to running, is more than offset by the fact that it's so much easier to find an opportunity to walk.
Ive started doing 6kmh walk for 30min after gym, two times a week and Ive lost like 10kg in 6 months
"Load carriage" is a thing the military has put some effort into studying. A 50lb pack turns a brisk walk into something that burns 100s of calories. Even an extra 20lbs on your back adds up. It might not feel like a lot, but the difference in heart rate for same perceived effort is shocking.
I can ruck a 20lb pack for 20 miles a day for weeks, but even that took a lot of training. Doing that with 50lb feels like it would be impossible. Maybe my 135# body has some limiting factor.
That being said, I love taking out a 50lb pack just to clear my head. It's like forced meditation.
Slow down a bit to 4-5km/h and you can last much longer, not to mention multitask more effectively (listen to an audiobook, be on a phone call, just brainstorm, etc.) so you don't actually need to set aside hours a day specifically for walking.
It is kind of nothing if you live "the old school way", that amount of walking just accumulates. If you live "the post covid way" or "car with close parking lot way", then it becomes large block of time you have to carve separately.
It sounds plausible that the amount of hunger we feel when we feel a fixed number of calories may depend on how much that depleted our glycogen stores, among other factors.
Last year, I mostly switched from a road bike to a gravel bike and found the lowest gear far more comfortable for steep hills because the lowest speed was about half.
* I actually can't remember the exact speeds, but I think it was about 5mph / 8km/h on the road bike and roughly about 5km/h on the gravel bike.
The vast majority of middle-aged people who exercise at all, do only one thing.
You do you, but it's a bit like somebody consuming only large amounts of meat and somebody suggesting that it may be beneficial to reduce some of that and balance the diet with some other nutrients.
Health isn't my goal, it's a second-order effect. I just know that you can achieve top 1% fitness without the time-consuming yoga and gym routines.
This presupposes running using glycolysis for energy. Most runners will do this, but there are quite a few ultra runners who use ketosis instead, and derived almost all their energy to run from fat. It's not great if you want to go very fast (say, track and field events), but it has some distinct benefits for very long ultra trail events.
That gives you a hair over 13 min time on a 3000m run. When I was in the (Norwegian) military, that time would get you a 7 out of 9 score for males, and 8 (or 9) out of 9 score for females on a physical test. Pretty solid score.
It would also almost give you a sub 3 hour marathon.
You'd be a pretty capable runner if you can keep a steady 7 min mile, for the sake of running efficiently!
For BUD/S (Navy Seals), it seems like a 1.5 mile run is part of the physical screening test, a 10m30s time would put you 10 seconds from the "competitive category". Minimum requirement is 11m
And from my memory, that was roughly the same requirements in my country for most SOF positions.
But, of course, those screening tests aren't necessarily done under ideal conditions. But if you can do a 7 min mile, it's not your conditioning that will stop you. You should be able to pass the minimum requirements for every position in the military.
They are remarkably non-stringent. Basically the ones I pay attention to (running, rowing (on an erg), pushups etc) have a highest level that means "good athletic conditioning, but not particularly competitive at this activity".
Source: Guy who once ran a marathon in 3:00:06.
I did eventually break 3 hours multiple times but that near miss hurt for a long time. And yes, anyone who can run that fast, even for a single mile, is above average by a fair bit.
I’d be more interested in how they collected the data. A skilled and fit runner will run a lot more efficiently than a less skilled and less fit runner, and you’d also expect a skilled/fit runner to run faster than a less skilled/fit runner. So depending on how they collected the data, that could be a big confounder.
For starters, the data is biased because the basal metabolic rate of someone who does sports is higher than someone who doesn't, and that's without taking into account the higher metabolic rate of people who are overweight/obese (albeit for different reasons), and even for people who are fit, runners are trained to be more efficient at running (duh).
But the underlying message isn't really all that insightful: the optimal running pace isn't the slowest nor the fastest, but somewhere in the middle, which is pretty obvious to anyone who's done some running.
Lot of factors affect efficiency, but almost certainly neither very slow or maximum speed is most efficient.
The main exception would be heating, and even then, it's usually that the optimum performance is just really close to the top performance; e.g. imperfect combustion of more fuel being less efficient than perfect combustion of less.
That's a fancy way of saying "around 5%".
You need to be pretty fit to run that fast, especially over longer distances.
[1] https://www.marathon.se/racetimer?v=/sv/race/resultlist/5768...
This is two minute bins that made 10km in X minutes, only those under an hour are included.
min count percentage
30 9 1
32 18 1
34 46 3
36 89 6
38 182 12
40 160 10
42 162 10
44 150 10
46 159 10
48 176 11
50 83 5
52 102 6
54 111 7
56 69 4
58 61 4
7:00 min/miles is a 4:21 min/km, which would result in 21 min 5K, 43 min 10K, 1h 32 min half marathon and 3h 3min marathon.
I can run a 7 min mile pace, but I can't sustain it for a long time, and when it comes to comparing running VS walking, 20-30 km feels like the distance you should use, as that's a distance most people could walk daily over an extended period of time (e.g a week).
I was never a great long distance runner, but I took it seriously for 1.5 years and I could run a half marathon just under 2hrs. The pace the whole time felt dynamic, everything went perfect, I was significantly faster than all the joggers by the river. I needed two days to recover, and the suggested place would have been 30 minutes faster.
With 7 min/mile pace, I would qualify for the Boston Marathon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_Qualifying_S...
7 min mile sustained feels like an impossible goal.
Hell, my best single mile is 6:48 and I'm dead at the end of that.
At age 12, I ran a 5:05 mile with no training except running a weekly all-out mile for PE class. At age 14, I ran a 17:14 5K after three months of training in my first cross-country meet of my first season. I PRed at 16:04 two years later. In my late 20, I was still hitting an 11:30 2-mile in the Army's fitness test pretty easily, mostly without running. I swam every day, did a lot of rowing, and ran track repeats for 8 weeks leading up to the test.
Today, I run almost 80 miles a week right now, a structured, principled program, and I can't get anywhere remotely close to the times I once used to run almost effortlessly. Same person, same genetics, but in my 40s after a decade of being mostly sedentary. It takes its toll and it makes people who take this up as a hobby because they got fat in their 30s think something is impossible that likely would have been quite doable if they'd been doing it their entire lives.
20-30km every day for a week, i.e. 140-210 km/week?
Fun fact, according to [1] 160-220 km/week is the training regime of world champion marathon runners like Eliud Kipchoge.
That guy that ran across America did 72 miles (115 km) per day [2]
But these certainly aren't "most people" weekly running distances :)
[1] https://therunningclinic.com/runners/blog/train-like-kipchog... [2] https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a20828478/ultrarunner-pete...
Anecdotally, when I start (or re-start) running I find the pace I can run at increases quite rapidly. That makes sense with this data - although my fitness is only increasing slowly, being able to produce slightly more power actually gives a disproportionate increase in pace because the higher speed is more efficient per km.
It's what makes us such terrifying hunters... prey can outrun us but then when they invariably have to stop to recover, we eventually just turn up and they have to keep running again.
So, any activity where you're cranking the ol' powerhouse up to 120% and going for a run is going to incur a cost, both in terms of energy consumption (which, as the post demonstrates, is slightly more efficient than a fast-paced walk), but then also the resultant metabolic waste which needs to be eliminated, which is a process that takes place during recovery in the 24hrs or so after you've completed your "efficient" 7-minute mile, and I don't believe the article takes this into account.
I watched an interesting video recently (I think it was Kurzgesagt?) that talks about the illusion of high-intensity activity vs low-intensity but longer-duration activity.
We used to catch our prey through running, but not at breakneck speeds. Humans are absolutely made for endurance running, but not at 120% speeds.
1 MET = 4184 J/(kg hr),
1 MET = 1.162 m^2/s^3To make that unit even more confusing, by convention a Calorie is equal to a kilocalorie or 1000 calories.
Seemingly an elite athlete must have been tracked because almost nobody(considering the whole population) can run the given top-end pace for a sustained amount of time (More that 100metres).
I was hoping for more from the article, or at least that it was called 'calorically More efficient'.
> The answer probably depends on the person. Someone who regularly runs, runs more efficiently than someone who does not.
> But we can still generalize.
I seem to remember reading as a kid that this happened first in some Victorian bet (I would have read this in one of my dad’s kid’s books from the 1930s).
This was also a plot device in a Larry Niven short story (one of the Draco’s Tavern stories).
It doesn't seem that our body sees running as a method of travel, given our inability to regenerate cartilage and due the dehydration through cooling, it sounds more like a momentarily needed resource for survival.
This concerned me as someone who benefits from running. I found the following study which says "Cumulative number of years running, number of marathons completed, weekly mileage, and mean running pace were not significant predictors for arthritis".
I then learned about natural running (forefoot strike, using your joints for suspensions) which made logical sense to me. I could run again, even every day, and even more than a decade later no knee pain when running.
It does have the added benefit that you don't even need expensive running shoes anymore, because you use your body's joints for suspension instead of some gel midsole.
There is a slightly higher risk of ankle injury, which did happen once in over a decade. But otherwise I think natural running just makes so much sense.
You should also ease into it, because you need to train your calf muscles to do a bit more work.
Now if I feel a niggle coming somewhere I just do a bunch more squats throughout the day (whenever I remember really) and that usually solves it after a week or two. Nothing super strenuous - just like 10 to 15, perhaps 2 or 3 times a day
I have tried minimal shoes as well as super-spongy ones over the years, or trying to change heel strike Vs forefoot rtc and it seems it is only squats that make a difference!
Good luck.
- Big muscle groups activated all at once
- Burns a lot of calories
- Strengthens a whole chain of muscles necessary for good posture
- If done right (deep squats) makes you more flexible
So do them even if you don't have pain and you'll be better off anyway
The general principle is that you stay in the metabolic range where you're primarily burning fat reserves rather than using glycogen. The body typically has sufficient reserves for about 30 minutes of maximum glycogen use. The faster you run, the more glycogen you're using compared to fat, and so the quicker you'll run out and hit the wall.
A lot of people don't get on with MAF because it forces you to stop running and walk a lot in the early stages (essentially, you have a target HR of 180-age and if your HR is above that, you switch to walking), and even when your body does adapt and you can keep running all the time, you have to run much, much slower than you think you're capable of and that you probably want to be running at. But, over time you'll find your body gets more efficient and your speed at the target HR goes up over time. But to translate it into normal terminologoy, it's like you're always training in zone 2, although for most people 180-age is lower than the calculated top of zone 2.
An anecdotal result is that I used to be exhausted at the end of a 5km because I was running as fast as I could. Within a few weeks of switching to MAF training, I was routinely doing 10km-15km without really feeling tired and within a month I'd accidentally done a half marathon (very slowly, of course) after getting lost and being stuck on the wrong side of the river for 4km longer than I planned, and then an extra 3km the other side. I was tired at the end of that, but I also never would have believed I was even capable of that distance a month earlier.
That works out to a 3:03 marathon time. That's years of work to become so efficient.
I'm a little bummed that the article doesn't touch on how can maintain that pace for x amount of miles, since plainly: only people who have trained very carefully have a chance. So that running speed is off the table.
Stick to walking.
The correct way to write this is:
`kcal/kg/h = kcal/(kgh)`
The actual computations in the article are unaffected.
These guys need to get with the program and use metric units. For example, the cycling world uses watts per kilogram (W/kg) to quantify an athlete's output. This is the correct unit to use.
To help with this, note that 1 MET ≈ 1.162 W/kg.
But I agree it's lame.
Like all SI derived units, the joule is obtained by multiplying or dividing any number of SI base units, without using numeric scaling factors. 1 joule = 1 newton × 1 kilogram = m^2 × kg × s^−2.
The calorie measures the same quantity as the joule (energy or work), but 1 calorie = 4.184 joules. SI generally disallows having multiple units that measure the same quantity (e.g. tesla vs. gauss), especially ones that have numerical scaling factors (e.g. 1 bar = 100 kilopascals).
Quotes and references:
> the kcal is not officially part of the International System of Units (SI), and is regarded as obsolete, having been replaced in many uses by the SI derived unit of energy, the joule (J)
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie
> (this page does not contain any mention of the word "calorie")
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units
> (Section 4: Units outside the SI) (page 29) Examples of other non-SI units: calorie
> (page 52) (year 1948) calorie
> (Section 2.2: SI derived units) (page 21) SI derived units with special names and symbols: joule | J | N ⋅ m | m^2 ⋅ kg ⋅ s^−2
You could slice this a million ways to tease out many different efficiencies.
I have to disagree. I run 20 miles per week at about 11 min/mile yet could not run a single 7-minute mile to save my life. The best I can do at a "max effort" is a single 9-minute mile. Never even a 100-yard stretch in the 8s.
But then, I'm 77 years old.
Nowhere in this discussion have I seen an accounting for age. Perhaps with advancing age walking is more efficient (whatever the metric) regardless. Anecdotally (I see that word used here a lot <g>) I don't see any other runners my age, only walkers, so that must be true.