Calories burned walking

How it works

Calories are counted as MET × weight in kg × hours, with the values of the 2024 Compendium of Physical Activities: walking at 5 km/h is rated 3.8 MET, that is about 0.76 kcal per kilo of body weight for each kilometer. The step count uses the stride length estimated from height: 41.5% for men and 41.3% for women.

Tip

A faster pace or walking uphill burns more: this is an estimate for flat walking.

Why walking uses almost as much as running, over the same distance

The arithmetic surprises people: on top of what you would burn sitting still, walking at 5 km/h costs about 0.56 kilocalories per kilo of body weight per kilometre, running at 8 km/h about 0.9. The difference is real, but far smaller than the effort suggests, because the cost of moving a body one kilometre depends mostly on weight and distance, not on speed.

What really changes is the time: that kilometre takes five minutes running and twelve walking. Someone with an hour available burns more by running; someone thinking in kilometres, and perhaps unable to run, discovers that walking is no consolation prize at all.

What raises consumption, in order

The gradient, by a long way: walking at a ten per cent incline can double the consumption compared with the flat, which is why the inclined treadmill is the favourite exercise of people who do not want to run. The weight carried, which adds to your own: a ten-kilo backpack on a seventy-kilo person raises the spend by about fifteen per cent.

Then the surface (sand, fresh snow and trail cost far more than tarmac) and finally speed, which counts for less than people think as long as you stay at a natural gait. Above six kilometres an hour, though, walking becomes unnatural and consumption climbs sharply: that is the point at which the body would rather run.

Steps, and the number that comes from no research at all

The ten thousand steps do not come from a study but from a Japanese advertising campaign of the 1960s, for a pedometer literally called the «ten-thousand-step meter». It is a convenient round target, not a biological threshold.

Later research found something more useful and less round: the largest benefits for mortality are concentrated in the move from very little to some, that is between two thousand and seven or eight thousand steps a day, and beyond ten thousand the gains continue but flatten. For someone who walks little, in short, the first extra thousand steps are worth more than all the rest.

The steps-to-kilometres conversion, and why it is approximate

Stride length depends on height and gait: it usually sits between 65 and 80 centimetres, and the estimate from height (41.5% for men and 41.3% for women, that is 71 cm for someone 172 cm tall) can be ten per cent out in either direction. Over ten thousand steps that is seven hundred metres of difference.

Anyone wanting their own figure can measure it in a minute: count twenty steps on a flat stretch, measure the distance and divide. It is also the way to notice that a pedometer miscounts in certain situations: pushing a trolley, keeping the phone in a bag or gesturing at the table all produce steps that never happened.

Nearby tools

For the consumption of other activities there is Calories burned, for steps already counted Steps to miles & kilometers, for daily needs Calorie needs and for weight Calorie deficit. If you move on to running, Pace calculator and Heart rate zones. The three walking pages use the same values and the same stride length: an hour at 5 km/h gives the same calories on all three.