Miracle Results of Walking
This is by far the best exercise for the average person
interested in gaining and maintaining good health. It exercises all
of the large muscles and can be done relatively easily without a lot
of investment. The faster the pace the more aerobic the exercise,
and conversely, the slower the pace the more anaerobic the exercise.
Walking
at a moderate pace is simply the best fat-burning exercise there is.
Dr. Leaf of the Executive Health Organization in California said,
“These men I have examined around the world who live in vigorous
health to 100 or more years are great walkers. If you want to live a
long, long time in sturdy health you can’t go wrong in forming the
habit of long vigorous walking every day…until it becomes a habit as
important to you as eating and sleeping.”
Walking has scores of benefits that could be listed, a few of
the more noticeable ones are: walking aerobically will give you all
the fitness benefits of jogging, cycling and dance aerobics. Walking
can make you slim and is a perfect weight-management exercise.
Walking is simple, safe and
helps prevent against heart and circulatory disorders;
it has even been attributed to lowering blood pressure –
it is the best natural medicine for high blood pressure. Walking
will help you sleep better and is an antidote to stress,
nervous tension and depression while actually
counteracts anger and anxiety. Walking can improve your
posture and helps relieve lower back pain as well as the
pain associated with stiffness of arthritis. It keeps
your bones strong, which prevents osteoporosis. It is
one of the best defenses against diabetes.
Walking is the perfect
companion for dieting. Dieting alone is a dead-end
activity; it is almost pointless, the reason being
because a person’s basal metabolic rate (BMR – the
speed your body burns calories at rest) actually slows
down when there is less food consumed. It goes into a
kind of starvation mode and begins to require fewer
calories to burn to keep you alive; as such, your body
does not need the excess calories you were once
consuming and therefore are deposited on your waist
instead. The nice thing about BMR is that a person can
influence it through exercise. The more exercising a
person does, the more calories are consumed to fuel the
activity. Muscles need fuel; fat does not. The more
muscle mass you have the more your BMR is increased just
to keep you going. For any kind of diet to work you
almost always need to have some kind of physical
activity. Walking is perfect for a dieter.
Aerobic walking will help
change your body composition by increasing the amount of
muscle tissue compared with fat tissue. This is
important because up to half the weight normally lost on
calorie-reducing diets without exercise is muscle tissue
– a loss of muscle tissue lowers BMR rather than
increase it!
This is the problem with only
dieting and not including a regular exercise like
walking, you can end up losing the weight, lowering your
BMR and be stuck with maintaining a semi-starved diet to
keep the pounds off. Regular walking, at a pace of
around 3.5 to 4 miles per hour, will increase your BMR
and still allow you to eat well and stay healthy and
trim. Not only will you body burn on an average of 100
calories for every 15 minutes of brisk walking, but the
increased BMR will continue to burn calories at an
advanced rate for several hours after you have finished
exercising. As a rule of thumb,70 steps per minute
equals about 30 minutes per mile, or about 2 miles per
hour; 105 steps per minute equals 20 minutes per mile,
or 3 miles per hour; and, 140 steps per minute equals 15
minutes per mile, or 4 miles per hour. The nice thing
about exercise is that it is cumulative! In other words,
everything you do throughout the day counts and add up
to total minutes of exercise. If you don’t have an
extra thirty minutes a day then take the stairs, park a
little farther than normal, get up from the desk and
walk down the hall. Everything counts, it all adds up.
All calories are not the
same. Our bodies are designed to burn carbohydrates
first (simple sugars called glucose) and store the fat
for future, leaner days ahead. This is why a high BMR is
ideal – the work that it takes for your body to burn
carbohydrates creates a “thermal factor” (T-factor)
which in and of itself will burn an additional 200 to
300 calories a day just to keep fueling the body. The
more calories from carbohydrates you consume than from
fat the better off you will be with a higher BMR.
It works like this: your body
has to work much harder to burn carbohydrates, or
convert carbohydrates into energy. The effect of this is
called thermogenesis and is the action of the body
burning up excess calories consumed as food energy to
produce heat. Activities that involve sudden bursts of
energy like weightlifting, etc. do not require lots of
oxygen; they get their fuel from glucose. On the other
hand, aerobic exercise requires an oxygen mixture to
burn the fuel stored in fat. Fat is stored in and around
the muscle tissues and requires oxygen in order to break
it down and burn. Regular, consistent walking gives the
body the oxygen it needs to break down the fat stores
for fuel. Walking aerobically where you elevate your
breathing for a consistent duration directly attacks the
fat stores in your body. Not only does it burn excess
fat, but also it keeps it off forever.
Resources:
The Walking Diet
by Les
Snowdon and Maggie Humphreys
Prevention’s Complete Book of
Walking: Everything You Need To Know To Walk Your Way To
Better Health by Maggie Spilner
Related
Links:
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