What Makes Your Heart Beat Faster, Jogging or Sprinting?

Jogging and sprinting seem like similar activities. After all, sprinting is just jogging at a faster rate, but that's where the similarities end. Jogging and sprinting involve completely different energy-producing systems -- the aerobic and the anaerobic respectively. Sprinting makes your heart beat much faster than jogging, which leads to a host of unique health benefits. Which exercise is right for you depends entirely on your personal fitness goals.

  1. Jogging

    • Jogging is a common form of exercise for increasing cardiovascular fitness and shedding calories. Traditionally, joggers tend to run at a leisurely clip that they can keep up for a long period of time, typically between five and eight miles per hour. How fast your heart beats when you jog depends on various genetic factors and your level of conditioning, but you should aim for about 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate, or between 139 and 152 beats per minute. Keeping your heart rate in the aerobic zone ensures that your heart is able to pump enough blood to supply your muscles with oxygen so you can exercise for an hour or more.

    Sprinting

    • Since sprinting is more intense than jogging, it stands to reason that your heart rate is going to be much higher during a short sprint than a long morning jog. Sprinters explode off the starting line, pumping their arms and legs fast to cross the finish line at top speed. Sprinting burns calories, pushes your anaerobic threshold and boosts your metabolism for hours after you're finished exercising. You should aim to push yourself to 80 or 90 percent of your maximum heart rate during a short sprint, or between 166 and 179 beats per minute. Keeping your heart rate in the anaerobic zone forces your muscles to burn carbs for energy and work through an oxygen deficit.

    Effects

    • They involve many of the same muscles, but sprinting and jogging have drastically different effects on the body. Both forms of exercise burn calories, but jogging typically improves aerobic conditioning while reducing total-body mass, including muscle mass, through calorie burn. If you burn more calories than you consume, you'll lose weight. Sprinting, on the other hand, increases your heart rate more than jogging and stimulates the release of hormones that allow you to build muscle tissue faster. Since your muscles work harder during anaerobic exercise than aerobic exercise, your heart is forced to pump faster while sprinting to supply your muscles with as much oxygen as possible.

    Considerations

    • Sprinting is more intense than jogging, involving much higher muscular and cardiovascular effort over a short amount of time and forcing your heart to work harder. It may be difficult to perform an intense sprinting routine if you aren't in good shape already. While sprinting strengthens your heart, you should work up to a higher heart rate gradually to avoid heart complications and unnecessary stress, according to the National Council on Strength and Fitness.