Walking is a great way to improve or maintain your overall health. Just 30 minutes every day can increase cardiovascular fitness, strengthen bones, reduce excess body fat, and boost muscle power and endurance.
Physical activity, such as walking, is important for weight control because it helps you burn calories. If you add 30 minutes of brisk walking to your daily routine, you could burn about 150 more calories a day. Of course, the more you walk and the quicker your pace, the more calories you'll burn.
Studies have consistently found that regular walking can have great health benefits.
The short answer is yes. “Walking is just as good as any other form of exercise,” says University Hospitals pediatric sports medicine specialist Laura Goldberg, MD. “The guidelines are 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity a week. It doesn't really matter how you get that.
A brisk 10-minute daily walk has lots of health benefits and counts towards your 150 minutes of weekly exercise, as recommended in the physical activity guidelines for adults aged 19 to 64.
Brisk walkers had a 35 percent lower risk of dying, a 25 percent lower chance of developing heart disease or cancer and a 30 percent lower risk of developing dementia, compared with those whose average pace was slower.
The average American walks 3,000 to 4,000 steps a day, or roughly 1.5 to 2 miles. It's a good idea to find out how many steps a day you walk now, as your own baseline. Then you can work up toward the goal of 10,000 steps by aiming to add 1,000 extra steps a day every two weeks.
For example, regular brisk walking can help you: Maintain a healthy weight and lose body fat. Prevent or manage various conditions, including heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer and type 2 diabetes. Improve cardiovascular fitness.
After 3-4 days of walking: you will notice the “better fit” or more room in your clothes! After 7 days of walking: real changes are happening! You have used body fat as energy (fat burning!) Muscles feel more toned!
Walking for 30 minutes at a brisk pace covers a distance of 2.0 to 2.5 km and burns about 125 calories (520 kiloJoules). This amount may not seem like much, but if you walked five days a week within one year you would burn over 32,000 calories which would burn off more than 5 kg of fat.
About walking
Just 30 minutes every day can increase cardiovascular fitness, strengthen bones, reduce excess body fat, and boost muscle power and endurance. It can also reduce your risk of developing conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and some cancers.
“If all you do is walk briskly for 30 minutes, you've burned just 200 calories. Since 3,500 calories is a pound of fat, you'd need 17.5 days to lose one single pound. At most, you'd be losing two pounds a month.
You will first lose hard fat that surrounds your organs like liver, kidneys and then you will start to lose soft fat like waistline and thigh fat. The fat loss from around the organs makes you leaner and stronger.
How much should I walk to lose 10 kg? 30 minutes a day of brisk walking or power walking 5 days a week can help you reduce up to 10 kgs.
If you plan to walk for 4 miles (or 6.4 km) a day, you will begin to lose weight almost immediately. But along with your exercise routine, you need to maintain a balanced and healthy diet so that you don't put on the calories you're working hard to burn.
How much weight you can lose from walking depends on your current weight, diet and activity level. We recommend losing no more than 1 to 2 pounds per week for sustainable weight loss, which means you could potentially lose 10 pounds in five weeks.
Studies show walking is one of the best ways to shed belly fat, in less time than you think. Researchers reviewed 40 years of studies on exercise and belly fat and found that just 2 1/2 hours of brisk walking a week--about 20 minutes a day--can shrink your belly by about 1 inch in 4 weeks.
Walking might not be the most strenuous form of exercise, but it is an effective way to get in shape and burn fat. While you can't spot-reduce fat, walking can help reduce overall fat (including belly fat), which, despite being one of the most dangerous types of fat, is also one of the easiest to lose.
Without understanding your caloric intake, walking 10,000 steps or more might not cause enough meaningful fat loss. However, there are enormous health benefits to increasing your activity level through moderate exercises like walking.
As a result, the CDC recommend that most adults aim for 10,000 steps per day . For most people, this is the equivalent of about 8 kilometers, or 5 miles.
Walking an hour a day builds your stamina, conditions your heart and lungs, and strengthens your legs so that you have a good foundation to handle physical activity.
What does 10,000 steps look like? Ten thousand steps equates to about eight kilometres, or an hour and 40 minutes walking, depending on your stride length and walking speed.
If the average stride length is 80 centimetres, it takes 1250 steps to walk one kilometre. Put simply, someone weighing 70 kilograms would use about 1840 kilojoules while covering their 10,000 daily steps.
“One of the most effective ways to reduce belly fat is to regularly take part in aerobic exercise, such as walking. Walking a mile (1.6 km) burns approximately 100 calories,” she added.