Walk Your Way To Fitness, Are You Serious!?

I know…why is someone called “Warrior Mind Coach” talking about walking for fitness? After all you’d probably expect me to talk about super sets of deadlifts with kettlebell snatch followed up with weighted pull-ups and a couple 400 M runs right?

Well…perhaps due to its proven simplicity and comparable only easy access, walking is the most undervalued of all the exercise formats.  In general, many people view it as only been suitable as routine to fitness for the weak, elderly or for the very out of shape.

However, both the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine recommend walking as an exercise intervention that can improve a number of health measures.

In this post you’ll learn the value of walking and its benefits to help in ensuring optimum health.

The Benefits of Walking

• Race walkers can cover a mile in just over five minutes and a full marathon in about three hours.  Although over 40% of journeys in the United States are less than 2 miles, only 10% of the short trips are not made by car.  The short trips offer a lot of opportunity for walking.

• Walking a mile burns just as many calories as running – it just takes longer. Walking has been proven to be an effective treatment for mild depression, reducing symptoms by 47%.

• Walking for fitness first gained popularity here in the United States in the 1980s after cardiologist James Rippe, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, published details about how beneficial walking was for his patients recovering from a heart attack.  His results showed that walking can not only reduce important health parameters such as high blood pressure and cholesterol, but also significantly aid weight loss.

• Studies have shown that exercise doesn’t have to be vigorous to reduce cardiovascular risk factors; even strolling can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

• As with any activity, walking uses energy, so adding walking to your daily activity will burn extra calories.  As long as you don’t compensate by eating extra food, regular fitness walking will result in weight loss.  In addition, if you walk up a steep incline or increase your pace, you burn more calories.

• Race walking speeds of over 5 mph will burn as many as 600 calories per hour.  A 12-minute-per-mile pace, about 5 mph, can burn as many as 50% more calories than the 20-minute-per-mile pace, which is 3 mph.  If you’re walking faster, you’ll not only burn more calories, but you also spend less time each day exercise.

• As a weight-bearing exercise, walking can also positively impact bone density.  Osteoporosis reduces the density of bones and can be life threatening.  Several studies have reported that regular walking in moderate to brisk speeds increase bone density – even for just 30 minutes a day.

• Regular aerobic conditioning, which is precisely what walking is, can reduce stress.  A walking program has been shown to produce significant gains in self-image, confidence, and feelings of well-being in addition to reducing depression

• Exercise related injuries are shown to be much lower for walking than most other exercise formats.  For example, during running, the body has to absorb impacts equal to around five times your body weight, but walking causes impact stress of only around two to three times your weight.  Therefore, walking is less likely to produce injuries and is consequently being recommended as a rehab activity for injured runners.

• Studies have shown that increasing the intensity of walking program, unlike other modes of exercise, doesn’t carry any increased risk of injury.

• When it comes to exercise for seniors, it can be argued that walking is the foremost option – although, of course, every type of exercise has some risk associated with it.  However because walking is a low impact activity, the risk is lower compared to other forms of exercise such as running.

• Walking is not just a simpler, easier version of running; you actually burn more calories walking fast than you do running.  The two activities are obviously similar and offer common benefits, but walking also has the bonus of reducing the likelihood of impact injury.  It also affords an opportunity to keep your fitness level up by exercise seemed with certain injuries that running might not allow.

• Walking also provides the ideal gentle workout mode on the day following a race or particular heavy training session.  Furthermore, it allows partners of dissimilar abilities to exercise together because the fitter person speed-walking will be working hardest try to keep up with the less the person who is running.

Reference: Physiology and Fitness – The Great Courses®