Sprinting gets your nervous system fired up, releases endorphins and other hormones, and activates muscle fibers that would otherwise be dormant. It opens up your lungs, it's a complete fully-body burn, totally exhausting...it's hard.
It triggers muscle growth and burns fat. As Martin Rooney says, it's "Doing something for which your body was built to do."
Sprinting is a high-intensity exercise, a form of anaerobic exercise, which means that the body does not rely on oxygen to fuel the workout but rather, your body fat and muscle glycogen—a kind of glucose that your body stores as an energy reserve.
Here are some key points to consider when weighing Sprinting vs. Jogging:
Calories and Fat Loss
Since sprinting is anaerobic more calories are burned efficiently in the muscles during and even after, which directly leads to weight loss. Moreover, sprinting burns carbohydrates when the body is fasting.
Jogging, on the other hand as an aerobic exercise that instead relies on oxygen to fuel your workout without drawing additional energy from the body, so naturally, you burn fewer calories.
Hormones
Anaerobic exercise (sprinting) makes your body release several benefiting hormones including endorphins, testosterone, and GH (essential for burning fat, restoring tissue, and building muscles).
The testosterone/cortisol ratio is effected, which means that the body-building effect of testosterone is more pronounced than the muscle-wasting effect of cortisol
Jogging releases these too, but it takes longer to produce this effect. This is because the changes in the level of hormones in the blood depend more on the intensity of the exercise than on its duration.
Jogging and Sprinting are both great in this department...Now you know why doctors prescribe running for patients suffering from anxiety and depression
Time Saving
With busy schedules, work, family, kids, travel...this list goes on and on...sprinting is a clear winner when the talk is about time management. A sprint workout takes a mere fraction of the time that a sustained jog does.
You can burn as many as 200 calories in as little as 2.5 minutes with sprints and Interval Training (perform a short duration of high-intensity exercise and then recover for a longer period with rest, walking or easy exercises).
In comparison, jogging for 10 minutes burns less than 100 calories. That says sprinting is 7x more efficient in the calorie burning department.
Diabetes and Blood Pressure
A high-intensity workout for even 3 minutes works well on your metabolism. Such intense sessions every two days can lower your risk of diabetes by making your body more sensitive to insulin and by clearing glucose from the blood faster. It even lowers the blood pressure on the arteries.
Joint Health
It's a popular statement these days to claim that jogging is bad on your knees, hips...all of your joints. It's not definitive by any means and there are just too many factors that need to be considered: genetics, body weight, structure, shoe selection, running technique, over-training (too much too soon).
Done right with gradual, proper training protocols and incorporated strength training, jogging can be totally fine on your joints.
Sprinting is no different, all factors need to be considered (proper protocols, starting gradually, etc.) but just considering the one simple aspect of total time under stress being much less than that of jogging, your joints are more likely to avoid inflammation and trouble.
Bottom Line
Sprints are great, Jogging is too and they BOTH have to be done properly in respect to comparison. If you like to jog, then do it. Whichever you prefer, go for it. If you are looking to mix it up, save time, do more in a shorter duration, then try some sprint interval training.
Noted Resources: Babraj, John A., Niels BJ Vollaard, Cameron Keast, Fergus M. Guppy, Greg Cottrell, and James A. Timmons. “Extremely short duration high intensity interval training substantially improves insulin action in young healthy males.” BMC endocrine disorders 9, no. 1 (2009): 3. Pool, A. J., and J. S. Axford. “The effects of exercise on the hormonal and immune systems in rheumatoid arthritis.” Rheumatology 40, no. 6 (2001): 610-614. Schwarz, Lothar, and Wilfried Kindermann. “Changes in β-endorphin levels in response to aerobic and anaerobic exercise.” Sports Medicine 13, no. 1 (1992): 25-36. Kuoppasalmi, K., H. Näveri, M. Härkönen, and H. Adlercreutz. “Plasma cortisol, androstenedione, testosterone and luteinizing hormone in running exercise of different intensities.” Scandinavian journal of clinical and laboratory investigation 40, no. 5 (1980): 403-409. Meckel, Yoav, Alon Eliakim, Mariana Seraev, Frank Zaldivar, Dan M. Cooper, Michael Sagiv, and Dan Nemet. “The effect of a brief sprint interval exercise on growth factors and inflammatory mediators.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 23, no. 1 (2009): 225-230. Covert Bailey. Smart exercise: burning fat, getting fit. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995, pp. 54–55. https://www.curejoy.com/content/sprinting-or-jogging-which-is-better. http://jasonferruggia.com/speed-martin-rooney-sprint/
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