Forget "slow and steady wins the race." A new study shows that, at least sometimes, the best way to conserve¹ energy and reach your destination on time is to alternate between walking and running -- whether your goal is the bus stop or a marathon finish line. In the January 30, 2013 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface², researchers examined how people budget their time as they travel on foot to reach a destination at a particular appointed time. The study found that when people have neither too much time nor too little time to reach their destination, they naturally switch back and forth³ between walking and running, which turns out to be the best strategy for saving energy.

 

The study is the first of its kind not conducted on treadmills⁴（跑步机）, and it supports the notion that the human body has an innate⁶ sense of how to vary speed to optimize⁷ energy when we're on the move in our natural environment.

 

"We don't live our lives on a treadmill⁵," said Manoj Srinivasan, co-author of the study and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State University. "To better understand how we move in our everyday life, and how our spontaneous movements relate to energy expenditure⁸, we have to study what people do away from the treadmill. Once we have a good enough understanding of how we naturally move to conserve energy, we can build a solid theory and apply it in practical ways -- designing better shoes, or better prosthetics（修复学） that let people walk using less energy."

 

In tests, 36 college students were asked to travel a distance a little longer than a football field, either on pavement outdoors or inside a school hallway. They were given a stopwatch, and told to arrive at their destination at a specific time -- not before and not after, but right on time. The students were free to set their own pace to achieve that goal, and were not told whether to walk or run.

 

Sometimes the students were told to make the trip in two minutes, so they could walk the entire way at a leisurely⁹ 2 miles per hour (about 1 meter per second) if they chose. At the other extreme, they were allotted¹⁰ only 30 seconds, so that they had to run the entire way at a brisk pace of 9 miles per hour (about 4 meters per second) to get there on time.

 

The researchers were most interested in what the students would do when they were allotted travel times between these two extremes. On a treadmill, people have to adjust their pace to match the machine in order to stay on the conveyer belt, but this study would reveal how people manage their gait, or movement pattern, when they can speed up and slow down whenever they want.

 

The study revealed the existence of a "transition region" between 4.5-6.7 miles per hour (about 2-3 meters per second) when the students tended to make the trip through a mix of walking and running. Regardless of any variable -- fitness level, height, weight, leg length, the amount of time they were given for the trip, whether they were indoors or out -- all the students employed a mixture of walking and running when they were moving at speeds within the transition region.

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