the point of my post is that biochemically walking uses up more %fat for energy than running, running causes an exponential decay while walking does not. no matter how fast you run, youll lose more fat by walking.
ofcourse.. youll lose weight by starving yourself but doing that breaks your muscle down for energy. best option is to eat healthy and walk.
a low HR workout like a powerwalk requires less immediate energy which causes the body to burn fat rather than go into your immediate energy for high HR intensive workouts, which burn into your carbs. youll see that you lose more calories but burning carbs before they are fat results in higher calorie loss but burning fat is what youre aiming for not burning off the food you just ate..
basically..... when you walk, you arent as tired so fast and you can sustain your walk for 3-4hours which allows your body to naturally go into fat reserves before breaking down carbs which is GOOD. if you are at a high intensive workout, the body cannot sustain this for very long and it knows burning fat takes too long so it shifts to burning other resources for energy..basically you burn whatever you can for immediate energy, which is not fat.
athletes need to keep high HR because the more high HR workouts you do, the more efficient your body is at burning immediate reserves providing you more energy than a non-athlete would for a sprint piece allowing your muscles to not fatigue and get clogged up by lactate, which is good because if youre an athlete doing a 2k sprint, you want to be able to go 100% for all 2,000M, treating every meter like the first meter..
if you want to burn fat before you condition yourself for sports, walk and eat healthy. THEN do sprints and high HR workouts.
if you want to go straight into conditioning, go with high HR workouts because itll still help you burn fat in two ways, first ~5min will be the same as walking, rest will burn what would have turned into fat so when you sleep your body will burn the fat as you already burned your immediate energy reserves.
edit1:
the reason why birds are such amazing creatures is that when they fly they are so amazing is that they are able to very quickly turn their fat reserves into immediate energy without breaking down and causing them to fatigue after ~5min of flight. allowing them to migrate miles and miles on very low food. which is obviously necessary for survival.
edit2:
here is an article talking about what i talked about but indepth.
edit 3:
the figure below shows that the higher the intensity of the workout (high HR = high %O2 consumption) the less fat is burned.
http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/3/336.fullhttp://icb.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/3/336/F1.medium.gif
"To use only fat depots for energy a mammal must exercise at very low intensity and walk"reply:
this is what im saying is not correct. dont work your ass off, work efficiently and eat healthy. dont tire yourself out as %fat loss is a long term goal and isnt a sprint. if you tire yourself out youll strain your muscles and youll just have a bad time.
You're correct with a larger % of calories being burned via fat while walking vs running.
However the overall amount of calories being burned is significantly less when compared to running therefor higher intensity is still better for fat loss.