Oxygen cost of treadmill walking

¹ Department of Surgery, Division of Thoracic Surgery, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland

The development is described of an equation to predict the energy cost of treadmill walking of adult males. Oxygen consumption during level walking is considered as the product: oxygen consumption per step · number of steps per minute. At any given speed within the domain of the variable, number of steps per minute is then found to be a reciprocal function of height, and oxygen consumption per step a function of body weight. Rearrangement of the mathematical expressions that describe these relationships permits the calculation of oxygen consumption of level walking as the product of two constants, P_w, a constant for the individual; and K_s, a constant for the speed. It is suggested that these constants may have other uses besides the prediction of oxygen consumption of level walking. Oxygen consumption of grade walking is considered as the excess of oxygen consumption over that observed walking on the level at the same speed. This should be, but apparently is not, simply related to body weight. In a test of its predicting power, the equation predicted the oxygen consumption of 84 treadmill walks of 44 subjects, with a correlation coefficient measured: predicted values, = + 0.935.