What to Do: Brisk Walking or Jogging?

Are you already doing brisk walk? If yes, you will be aware of benefits of brisk walk which include very effectively preventing age related diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol, heart problems, increasing life longevity.

Brisk walk also puts lot less pressure on knees & ankles compared to jogging. And benefits of both brisk walk & jogging are very much the same.

Walking:

60-minute walk at 4 mph (15 minutes per mile): 243 calories burned
60-minute walk at 4.6 mph (13 minutes per mile): 270 calories burned

Running:


30-minute run at 6 mph (10 minutes per mile): 270 calories burned
30-minute run at 6.7 mph (9 minutes per mile): 300 calories burned

 (Source)

  

Anybody can take benefits of brisk walk by doing it; it's an universal way of staying fit. It is well suited to anybody who is suffering from little knee pain or back pain & is very much safer than jogging. If you've excess weight & also suffer from knee pain & you want to loose weight the safe way; weight loss by brisk walking can be done by increasing Intensity of brisk walk.

2 ways to increase brisk walk intensity will be:

1. Brisk walking at a place which has slopes
2. Carry  dumbbell while doing brisk walk

Don't buy special shoes for brisk walk. Start brisk walk with any shoes that you have.

If you've just decided that you want to be fit, start with brisk walk because starting brisk walk is simple & there are not much skills required to do it. To do a brisk walk:

1. Move legs fast such that it feels, legs pull your body
2. Land on foot heels

Also brisk walk allows body to adapt to fitness without putting much strain on your body which is very good at starting.

One important thing: if you do morning walk or evening walk with a partner, don't do it. Brisk walk with a partner isn't a brisk walk. As brisk walk is less intense, it allows to talk, but jogging being more intense, your heavy breaths won't allow you to talk more. Partner only when you want to jog, not while walking.

If you already do brisk walk, you may want to shift to jog if you like any of the benefits of jogging that I tell you:

As I've said benefits of brisk walking & jogging are very much the same but with jogging the benefits are achieved in half the time compared with the benefits from brisk walk. Approximately benefits of 60 min brisk walk & 30 min jogging are the same.

Jogging is very good for loosing weight. With doing intense activity like jogging, you lose calories even after activity has been finished. So overall calories lost by jogging will be greater than brisk walk. Also research (LINK) has found that joggers eat 200 calories less than they've expended whereas walkers eat 50 calories more than they have expended. Loosing weight is not possible by walking.

Jogging makes bones stronger when it's assisted with resting because jogging will put 3 to 4 times pressure of your body weight on legs.

Earlier people used to complain about the problems that jogging causes like calf pain, shin splints, side stitch. But today aided with specially designed running shoes, proper warm up & techniques, these problems do not exist at all.

The best way to transform brisk walk to Jogging is to do intervals of jogging between brisk walks.

Ricky