‘Wogging’ your way to better endurance

Forget slow and steady wins the race. According to a recent study, alternating between walking and running, which is better known as wogging, is the best way to conserve energy and reach your destination on time. Ohio State University 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 forth between walking and running, which turns out to be the best strategy for saving energy. The study supports the notion that the human body has an innate sense of how to vary speed to optimise energy when we’re on the move. “We don’t live our lives on a treadmill. To understand how our movements relate to energy expenditure, we have to study what people do away from the treadmill. Once we have a good understanding of how we naturally move to conserve energy, we can build a solid theory and apply it in our practical ways. Design better shoes, and build better prosthetics to let people walk using less energy,” said author Manoj Srinivasan. In a test conducted, 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 were told to arrive at the destination at a specific time. The students were free to set their own pace to achieve that goal, and were not told whether to walk or run. 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. “Students seemed to naturally break into a run or slow down to a walk to save energy while ensuring that they arrived on time,” he added.