Millie W: Walking Is Better than Running?

Quick blog today as I have a tonne of work to do!

Yes! In some ways walking is better than running, it all depends on you.

If, like me, you are pretty shocking at running (10 minutes is my max on a good day), walking for an hour is way better than running for 10-15 minutes everyday.

This is because, when you are running until you have used up all of it, all you're burning off are your carbohydrates. If you proceed to run after this you will begin to burn of other calories you have consumed during the day thus losing weight...in the long run (no pun intended).

Now I don't want to put a damper on your day, but some people that are not naturally gifted in the realm of athletics (me) will never be as good as a pro-athlete. Now most people say it's because they do hours of training. Well it is partly, but I could do the same amount of training as Mo Farah and still not be as good as him because it is all down to genetics!

I won't bore you with all the biological details, but people have a different amount of slow twitch muscle fibres and fast twitch muscle fibres (don't take the names literally, they don't mean what you think). People with predominantly slow twitch muscle fibres are well suited to running marathons, whereas those with more fast twitch muscle fibres (there are two types a and b), type a are most suited to 800m or basketball whereas type b is more 100m swim race, shot put or a golf drive (anaerobic activities)

So for those of us that are not very athletic,running a marathon, or less extreme, running for just half an hour is extremely difficult. You are better off walking (power walking if you can) for an hour if you want to burn calories/fat as running for a short period of time will simply burn your carbohydrates and not the cheeky chocolate bar you ate. However building it up so eventually you can run for 30-60 mins is definitely worth it as running does burn more than walking.

For some running for long periods of time is quite easy, so if you can definitely do and build it up also to perhaps running more distance in an allotted time rather than just seeing how long you can run for.

*Tip: when walking add weights to increase the resistance to make your workout harder and get better results!