I'm not trying to shit on walking for walking's sake, but if your goal is performance, health, or changing your body composition, I see no reason to prefer walking over running. You cover more distance. You get a better cardiovascular workout. Your lung capacity will increase more. Same for cycling if you have some injury or disability that prevents running.
In my view, it's all about what you can persuade yourself to do on a regular basis. I hate running, but enjoy cycling and walking. My spouse loves running, including marathons and ultras. Often she will sign up for a marathon, and I will ride my bike to the location of the race and cheer her on. Chasing a marathon on a bike is actually a workout if the race is on a closed course and you're looking for alternative routes.
Walking and cycling let me mix exercise and utility, e.g., commuting to work or walking to nearby shops. It's also just a pleasant lifestyle to go for days if not weeks without needing to drive. Truth be told, my love of mechanics and tinkering is one of my motivators for cycling.
It probably behooves everybody to at least give a few different exercise modalities a try, to see which one you can tolerate, with enough intensity to be beneficial. If you find one that's addictive, so much the better.
I've gotten myself some little dumbbells that I keep by my "work" computer, and I lift weights during online meetings because I know that my main modes of exercise don't do much for my upper body.
I'm a runner who never goes on an "exercise walk", but there are plenty of (non-injury) reasons someone might prefer walking:
- less strenuous
- much less fitness required to walk for an hour than to run for 30 minutes
- easier to avoid sweating while walking, which can be useful for some commutes
- easier to talk on the phone while walking
- easier to find someone to walk with you than it is to find someone who will run with you
The article was about making fitness easy and not about making fitness efficient. I 100% agree that running is more efficient, but I'd recommend walking to anyone who thinks "bleh/eww" at the thought of exertion.
Plus it's great for either recovery days or a supplemental activity to get blood flowing to promote healing. For example running in the morning and walking in the evening.
Running is very hard on your body. I say this as a runner. I’ve been doing it consistently since high school and I have the bones and tendons and form, yet still I hurt myself sometimes. Even though I feel great after running I never recommend other people do it. It’s kind of a crazy-person thing to do if you think about it!
If you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, humans likely have the ability to run to either escape from or to hunt prey. Long-distance running would not have held much use in day-to-day life.
So our bodies are efficient at running, but maybe not meant to be running all the time.
oft repeated, usually by runners, but it seems pretty dang inefficient. You're burning zillions of calories to get your food; how is that a good deal as compared to setting a trap or tossing a spear?
It's pretty tough to set an effective trap for catching herd animals on the African plains. Persistence hunts did frequently end by throwing spears. But spears are very short ranged. Hunters had to chase the animals and get really close in order to ensure a kill. And it doesn't take zillions of calories, just a few thousand.
Others here have already brought up the wear and tear running can have on the human body, but there's a psychological factor as well.
For many, walking is more enjoyable than most other exercise. Some people can do strenuous, repetitive exercise and not get bored or feel miserable, which is why a certain number of people can manage to go to the gym regularly and stare at a wall for an hour as they run on a treadmill and lift dumbbells. Others give up more easily in reaction to stimuli that isn't highly dopamine driven for them. For those people, if they can instead keep up walking on a regular basis, it makes more sense they stick with that rather than effectively punish themselves by running.
The huge difference is that walking isn’t excercising, it’s transport. Slotting 10k or 12k steps into your day likely requires changing some of your transport to walking even if you also go for “excercise walks”.
Running normally requires deliberately going for a run: alllocating time, changing clothes and so on. It’s not as easy to change a lot of would-be drives to walking. It’s not as convenient to fit a run into a lunch break as it is to fit a walk.
I see them as not mutually exclusive though. But for me the difference is that the walk actually gets done but the run doesn’t. The comparison is then: “is walking better than not running?” and answering that is much easier than comparing the two!
This is sort of the system versus goal issue applied to exercise. If you have to go out of your way (to a gym, to a trail) to get the exercise in then it's harder to maintain (for most people, and even for people who find it "easy" the habit can be broken by one bad week). Whereas if you convert a portion of your transportation to walking/cycling, you can create a more sustainable system around the activity.
Even doing little things like parking at the back of the parking lot and taking the stairs to the third or fourth floor office can add a decent chunk of walking to the day without creating a major hurdle (unless you're chronically late, the extra 5 minutes of walking to and from the parked car won't be bothersome).
Many people aren't in good enough shape to run. A bunch of extra body weight + poor technique is a recipe for an injury that leaves many people in a position where they now can't even walk without pain.
Walking and some mobility work are great for the the average person. Once they've got a decent baseline and have cleaned up their diet they can start adding more intense work.
Walking allows you to go from point A to point B without profuse sweat, eg. to run an errand or go to work. (When possible, which is rare in suburbia)
Walking also allows you to better appreciate the environment, fauna, flora and scenery, eg. on a hike. Sure you can take some of that in as an ultra-cross-trail-marathon runner but it's less contemplative.
As a long-distance cyclist, I've gotta say, it sounds like you walk slow. I'm a fast walker, and I can get excellent cardio on pretty much anything but a downhill route (which, I'll admit, my natural pace turns into a light jog down steeper hills). But, personal bias, I've never lived anywhere that hills could be avoided.
Walking and running are both good for cardio and long term health, but running has higher wear and tear on the body. Cycling is also great, but comes with its own risks of accidental (or malicious) injury or death
Walking is pretty safe compared to running or cycling, though. The article points out that no, you won't change body composition by walking, but it's a good starting point for people whose current activity level is walking between the car, couch, fridge, and bed.
Uh, it's much lower impact, much more enjoyable, and has a way lower recovery cost. I lift 5-6x a week; I'm not gonna go for a hard run when I need my legs to recover for my next squat session.
For general health benefits, it's simple: walking is easier to do consistently than running is. I walk to work and to get groceries, and each of those is ~20 minutes each way, so I'm getting in almost an hour and a half of walking most days on top of whatever else a given day has (I live in a Nordic city, so lots of stuff is walkable).
However, in my current state, I don't think I would be able to comfortably run the same distance every day. If I got into the habit, though, I expect I'd see more changes to body composition, though, yes.
Running is arguably one of the worst things you can do to your body, despite it's efficacy in improving your cardio performance. It's bad on your joints, your bones etc. Swimming and cycling are much much better.
That is decidedly untrue. The big problem with cycling and swimming is that they are low impact and don't stress your bones an joints enough. Your joints and bones are just like any other tissue in your body. They respond to stress by getting stronger and when they are not stressed they get weaker. As in all things you can of course over do it, but the amount of running the average person would do (15-20 mpw or less) is very beneficial to bone an joint health.
based on the new runners I've observed on sidewalks in the last 12 months I have to say proper form seems very difficult (/expensive, given need to hire a coach) to achieve.
Most people will instinctively run with decent form as long as they're not obese or already injured. Coaching can be helpful but usually isn't essential.
I'm as wrong as possible with this. I still believe that swimming and cycling are better for you, but the injuries I was concerned about (and personally experienced) are more typically associated with overworking your joints/bones/tendons and ligaments.
