Common fitness knowledge says that both walking and running will burn the same number of calories per mile. I am not quite sure where this piece of information first showed up or why it persists today, but I hope to clarify some of the confusion in this article.

Walking and running are perhaps the two most basic and leading forms of human movement. Every able bodied human can walk and run and learned to do so without any formalized training. Compare this to other activities, such as biking, swimming or swinging a golf club, which require more training in order to perform those movements correctly. This is one of the main reasons that walking and running are two of the best ways to get in shape and improve your overall health.

The logic for both walking and running a mile burning the same amount of calories makes sense. You cover the same distance so it should require the same amount of energy, right? Not necessarily. Calorie burning is usually closely related to the amount of oxygen you consume. When you are performing continuous exercise you burn about five calories for every liter of oxygen that you consume. Running generally requires significantly more oxygen than walking, even over the same distance.

In a paper titled "Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running