Leisureguy on Mastodon updated his post on Nordic walking and that proved the stimulus I needed to take up sticks again. I had a good workout yesterday, and as we discussed the topic, knowing that he used an Apple Watch, as do I, I asked which activity he used to record Nordic walks. Because of course Apple doesn’t believe people need to record their Nordic walks.
He uses Outdoor Run. I’ve always used Outdoor Walk, and I wondered whether Outdor Run might calculate energy expended differently. So today I did exactly the same route, bar minor deviations, at exactly the same pace. The results are ... interresting
Outdoor Walk | Outdoor Run | |
---|---|---|
Date | 2025-03-03 | 2025-03-04 |
Distance (km) | 3.15 | 3.16 |
Average pace (kph) | 9:54 | 9:53 |
Active Kcal | 208 | 234 |
Total Kcal | 268 | 294 |
It seems like Outdoor Run’s estimate of energy is 26 kcal higher for both Active, which naturally feeds through into total. And 26 is exactly 12.5% higher, which seems like a suspiciously round number, but is probably justified and is why I was suspicious in the first place.
I’m going to go back to using Outdoor Walk, because I don’t have a use for any of the additional metrics that Outdoor Run provides, and I wouldn’t want to cheat on energy expended. But perhaps in a week or two, when I’ve increased the daily distance a bit, I’ll try this exercise again.