Health and Fitness – Fitness Made Easy

Walking has never been accorded much respect. Traditionally, it has been considered useful locomotion but infective exercise. Worse, it is decidedly lacking in glamour. People shaped like bowling balls walk.

This is many peoples attitude to walking.

People who walk 3 miles a day, 5 days a week, at a 5-mile-an-hour pace produce the same cardiovascular gains as joggers running at an 8 to 9 miles-an-hour pace. Indeed, jogging at a moderate pace will burn 400 calories an hour; race walking will burn about 600. The fact is, walking is much better exercise than most people believe.

Stepping Up The Pace

All walking is decent exercise, and there’s no question that taking a 20 minute stroll once or twice a day will provide substantial benefits to your heart and lungs. But when you’re trying to lose weight, you want to burn serious calories. That means doing one of two things: walk longer and walk faster.

A 20 to 30 minute walk at a moderate pace tones muscles and relaxes you. It burns a few calories, but it isn’t enough for significant weight loss. If you’re really looking to shed fat, you have to walk for 45 minutes or longer.

This steady approach may lack glamour, but it pays dividends. Assuming that your diet stays the same, walking 45 minutes a day, four days a week for a year can result in losing 18 pounds.

It’s possible to get the same benefits in half the time by picking up the pace. If you walk a little faster, you can get everything out of walking that cycling, swimming, or running gives you.

I’ve been talking about walking as though it is a complete training program in itself. For many people, in fact, walking is their sole workout. But it’s also an excellent adjunct to an overall fitness plan. Foe example, runners often walk on their easy days, giving their muscles and joints a chance to recover.

Getting Started

Unlike virtually any other sport or exercise, walking is something that everyone can do. You don’t need lessons. You don’t have to be in great shape. You don’t need specialized gear. All you have to do is lace up your sneakers and step outside.

Speaking of sneakers…

• Get The Right Shoes – Despite what certain sales assistants might tell you, walking is not rocket science and so does not require space age gear. Still, having the right shoes can save your feet a lot of unnecessary pain. Walking is such a low-impact sport, you really don’t need anything fancy. Get shoes with a stable heel support and a reasonable degree of impact cushioning.

• Bring Along Some Sound – We all have days (actually, quite a few of them) when we would rather put our feet on the couch than on the walking trail. Here’s an easy way to combine R and R with a little bit of exercise: Hook up your ipod (or other digital musical portable player) and listen to your favourite music while you walk. Listening to fast-beat music not only makes exercise more fun, but the beat also makes it easier to walk faster.

• Establish A Training Pace – While fast walking is great for fitness, your muscles won’t appreciate it if you plunge into a 12-minute-mile pace without giving them advance warning.

• Play With Speed – Walking can quickly become monotonous, which is why many fitness walkers develop their own training regimen. For example, you may want to alternate brisk walking with sudden bursts of speed – say, a 60-yard sprint to the postbox down the road. Or walk pyramids – that is, go hard for a minute, easy for a minute, hard for 2 minutes, easy for 2 minutes, hard for 3 minutes, easy for 3 minutes and so on, going as high as you like and then coming back down.

• Take The Uphill Road – Obviously, walking uphill requires more effort than strolling on a flat surface, which is why the world has yet to see a fat Sherpa. Depending on how fast you walk, walking a moderately steep hill can burn anywhere from 8 to 15 calories a minute.

• Go Off Road – With hills in mind, trails are a great walking option too. You’ll get a better workout on varied terrain. If you’re out hiking, you’ll probably carry a backpack, and that will increase the calorie burn even more.

• Take The Advantage Of Winter – What’s bad for your heating bill can be great for your health. Walking in soft snow can burn up to 20 calories a minute. To get an equivalent calorie burn in the summer, you would have to run at a 6-minute-mile pace. Inclement weather offers other advantages as well, like reducing traffic and, if you’re lucky, keeping the neighbour’s yappy pekingese indoors.

Roberto Garcia (Health & Fitness Specialist) 
http://www.newhealthandfitnessdvds.co.uk

Specialist provider of Health and Fitness information and products including Fitness DVDs, Health & Fitness Books and Specialist Health & Fitness Supplements.

Tags: easy fitness, Exercise, health and fitness, racewalking, Walking

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Fitness, Walking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.