Q. I recently heard that walking at a fast walk burns more fat than jogging or running. This does not make sense to me, but I wanted to check on it. What do you know about it?

The answer to this question is both true and false. It all depends on how you look at it.

Walking can claim to burn more fat because, of the total percentage of calories that you burn while walking, most come from fat. This is true of all low-intensity exercise.

For example, say you walk for 60 minutes and burn 200 total calories. The percentage of fat burned for energy is between 60 - 80%, depending on a number of outside factors. We'll use the 80% for simplicity.

When you take 80% of 200 this means you've burned 160 fat calories. Remember this number.

Now let's look at running/jogging. Of the total percentage of calories you burn running, around 30-50% generally comes from fat.

Using the same example as above, say you run for that same 60 minutes and burn 600 calories. Using the 50% number, you've just burned 300 fat calories - 140 more than walking and in a shorter time.

The examples show the effect of perspective on the answer. Walking burns more fat as a percentage of total calories burned but running/jogging burns more fat calories when you look at the actual number of fat calories burned.

It basically all comes down to exercise intensity.

 

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