The number of steps you should walk every day to start seeing benefits to your health is lower than previously thought, according to the largest analysis to investigate this. The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, found that walking at least 3967 steps a day started to reduce the risk of dying from any cause, and 2337 steps a day reduced the risk of dying from diseases of the heart and blood vessels (cardiovascular disease).
I think the biomechanics of walking and running makes this a little more complicated than that. The efficiency of moving your body in different ways is different. I’m certainly no expert, but if I’m reading this study right (it’s open access so feel free to check me), then walking will pretty much always use less energy to cover a given distance than running/jogging, unless you force yourself to “fast-walk” at high speeds where a running/jogging gait would feel more natural.
I’m also pretty sure that for a given distance you would count fewer steps while running than you would if you walked the same distance, since each step covers a lot more distance when you run. So in terms of step counting, steps taken while running should be “worth” a lot more in terms of exercise than steps taken while walking.
In either case, my understanding of the evidence is that it has pretty consistently been shown across many different studies that almost any amount of daily exercise – walking, jogging, cycling, etc – is way, way better than no daily exercise at all. This study seems to fall nicely into that pattern.
This is a really cool old study that looks at how people switch to a run in order save energy - at a certain speed (which differs among individuals) it is less costly to run than to walk. We switch to a run because running uses less energy than walking would.
Forcing someone to walk when they’d rather run, or run when they’d rather walk, burns more calories. (And causes injury, but hey, calories burned, baby!)
I remember learning about this applied to various animals, too, and how this plays into the idea of humans being efficient at catching critters to eat because we can jog along for ages and wear them out. We just don’t stop, and eventually the prey drops with exhaustion. BBQ time! Humans: 1, Antelope: 0.
Yeah, persistence hunting! It’s cool stuff.
Another one of the studies I found while googling around about this yesterday mentioned something about kangaroos right at the end, and apparently their fast hopping gate is especially efficient. The mention seemed to come a bit out of the blue right at the end of the conclusion, but I was also just skimming so I may have missed a discussion of kangaroo gaits earlier in the paper.