How To Lose Weight By Walking

The Secret Weapon To Achieve Your Ideal Summer Body

Summer is right around the corner and men everywhere are getting ready for the season of topless fun in the sun, whether at the beach or poolside. And, for many of us, it means facing the effects of long winters of poor eating habits and hibernating inactivity on our bodies.

To be sure, the first order of business is to clean up your diet and get back into some kind of exercise routine, whether that's lifting weights or starting running. But there's another way to speed up fat loss with minimal impact on energy or motivation levels: walking.

It doesn't feel like exercise, but walking is a great way to increase activity levels and stealth burn some extra calories, and fitness trainers around the world are starting to take step counting as seriously as calorie intake, squats, deadlifts, and bench presses. VO2max or 1RM. Read on to learn how to get in better shape.

Benefits Of Walking For Weight Loss

Walking is not a very effective way to build muscle, nor is it a very effective way to improve endurance. In fact, it won't tax your body at all unless we're talking about long distances. It's not even exercise - which is why it's a great weight loss planning tool.

Walking Is Easy To Track And Measure

Two important components of any workout, whether it's lifting weights, running, rowing, biking, or swimming, is being able to track your efforts and map out some form of progression so that week after week, your body can adapt (and adapt ) greater challenge. Your muscles get stronger as you ask them to lift heavier and heavier weights; your lungs become more efficient when you run for longer periods of time or at higher speeds.

Walking has the advantage of being easy to track and easy to scale. You can track your time ("I walked for 15 minutes") or your distance ("I walked 5 city blocks" or "I walked 5,000 steps"), and you can level up by gradually increasing either or both variables challenge.

Tracking itself is also simple, but we recommend using steps instead of time or distance for the simple reason that you're walking throughout the day, even if you're going to the bathroom or walking to the corner shop, and it's easier to track each step rather than compartmentalize it. Each walk alone. Plus, almost everyone has a step tracker these days. You don't have to have a dedicated smartwatch or fitness tracker, either: every modern smartphone has a built-in pedometer, although you may need to activate it manually.

Start by checking your walking status over the past week or month. How many steps do you take on average each day? Next, set a new goal. If you've walked less than 5,000 steps, aim for 5,000 steps or more; if you've walked around 5,000 steps, aim for 10,000 steps.

The average human burns 30 to 40 calories for every 1,000 steps taken, which means walking 5,000 steps a day can burn an additional 100-200 calories, and walking 10,000 steps a day can burn an additional 200-400 calories. Considering that all you need to burn a pound of fat per week is a 500-calorie deficit per day, you can easily see how walking can greatly aid fat loss without forcing you to eat an overly restrictive diet.

Walking Will Not Cause Fatigue

When it comes to burning calories in a short period of time, running, biking, biking, and swimming all definitely beat walking. So why walk? It's simple: walking minimizes muscle fatigue and joint stress. If you also have to lift weights, how many long runs can you fit into your weekly workout plan? How would your heavy bench day go if you did an hour of freestyle swimming at your local pool in the morning?

Walking may not burn as many calories per minute or hour as other more intense exercises, but it relieves your body from the added stress of traditional cardio training, allowing you to conserve energy for fitness classes.

Finally, since walking isn't as strenuous as running or biking, it won't significantly increase your hunger levels. Exercise scientists have known for some time that people who engage in high-intensity cardiovascular exercise are more likely to engage in what's called "compensatory eating," which is gorging on as many calories at their next meal as they burned during exercise — —and thereby negating the advantages of weight loss.

You Can Incorporate It Into Your Daily Life

Significant, lasting weight loss requires more than a brief period of clean eating and hard training. In fact, a recent meta-analysis showed that more than 50% of dieters regained all the weight they lost within two years of completing the diet. This is not a cause for despair: it is a wake-up call. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you need to think in terms of lifestyle changes, not stop-gap measures, and walking is a very easy adaptation that can fit into almost everyone's lifestyle.

If you can walk to work instead of driving or taking public transportation, do so. If you can walk to the gym, the grocery store, or to see friends, do it. Take your dog for longer walks or take daily walks with your spouse or significant other. Choose the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator. Taken individually, any one of these changes won't have a decisive impact, but the sum of all these small choices adds up to a big impact.

You Can Turn It Into A Social Activity

There are many barriers to adopting a new exercise routine, from general laziness to time constraints, but one of the most underrated barriers is whether your workout is fun (or not). You're more likely to go to the gym day after day, week after week, and year after year if the gym is also a place for friends and familiar faces, rather than just a place for pain. Some people are perfectly content running alone, but many others prefer running in groups. Well, walking is great because while it does burn calories, it doesn't exhaust your lung capacity to the point where you can't carry on a conversation.

See what we're going to do? The long-term benefits of making "walking with friends" a regular thing instead of always sitting on the couch chatting over a beer will be huge. Heck, even playing golf with your friends on a Sunday morning counts as walking, as long as you choose to carry your clubs instead of riding in an electric golf cart.

The purpose of all this is not to downplay the main aspects of fitness. You should definitely do some form of resistance training, and you should definitely tax your cardiovascular system with some kind of high-intensity training. Instead, the point is that you shouldn’t ignore the low-hanging fruit. Walking may never feature in fitness montages on YouTube or in Rocky movies, but it's hard to get out of shape when you average over 15,000 steps a day, and there's a lesson here, just waiting to be applied.