Ben Greenfield explains why running 30 minutes burns as many or more calories than walking 60 minutes. High-intensity exercise triggers post-exercise oxygen consumption, where your body keeps burning calories for up to 36 hours after you stop. Walking doesn't create that afterburn effect the same way.
Welcome to the top 10 exercise, diet, lifestyle and nutrition questions from BenGreenfieldFitness.com My name is Ben, and today's question is question number three. It comes from listener Suzanne, and she says, what is better for fat loss? Walking on a treadmill for 60 minutes or running on a treadmill for for 30 minutes?
Back in my undergraduate exercise physiology class, actually, they told us that it doesn't matter. As long as you're covering the same distance, your body's going to burn the same amount of calories to do so. I don't know if they put it this way so they wouldn't confuse us, but later on in classes down the road, we discovered something called post exercise oxygen consumption, or what's also called your post exercise oxygen debt. And what that means is that we when you are exercising, if you get to the point where you're sucking air and you're breathing a little bit harder, at some point after the exercise has completed, your body has to repay that oxygen debt. And anytime your body is huffing and puffing, your heart rate is up, your body temperature is up, you're going to end up burning a lot more calories once that workout is finished. And that's why a lot of people will come to me and they're having a hard time losing fat, losing weight. And you say, I don't get this. I walk every day and I'm not losing weight. Your body is very efficient at walking. It doesn't get your metabolism very high, it doesn't get your body's temperature very high. And you don't have a very good oxygen debt after you do it. And so to answer your question, Suzanne, what you should be doing is anything that actually gets you up above what's called your ventilatory threshold, the point where you're starting to breathe hard. And this is assuming that you don't have any cardiovascular complications. You want to go get looked at by a physician before you do this if that were the case, but try to maximize the time that you have available to exercise by actually getting into that zone. And yes, running for 30 minutes, even though you're out there exercising for half as long, is actually going to burn as many and more calories than walking for 60 minutes. Yes, during the 30 minutes, you're going to burn the same number of calories as you did during 60 Minutes, but afterwards, the rest of the day and actually up to 36 hours after, you're going to burn more calories. So the running for 30 minutes definitely is better thanks to him.
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