Exercise is essential to staying fit, strong, and healthy. It also helps to prevent disease and maintain a healthy body weight. Walking is the activity that Australian adults most enjoy. You can do it almost anywhere. It is free and easy.
Walking reduces the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, arthritis, and depression. It also helps to combat anxiety, insomnia, and other sleep disorders.
Walking has health benefits because it changes our body systems. Fitness has been proven to be an important factor in preventing some of these conditions.
Fitness is often used as a synonym for aerobic fitness. However, it can refer to a wide range of components that are part of achieving optimum health, including muscular strength, endurance, flexibility, body composition, and aerobic fitness. Is walking enough to get the necessary exercise?
Aerobic fitness
A study on the benefits of walking revealed that it improved aerobic health, which is the heart’s ability to deliver oxygen to the muscles and the efficiency with which the muscles utilize this oxygen. To be effective, you need to walk at a moderate pace. This means that your breathing should be noticeable, but you can still carry on a conversation. This is usually a brisk stroll for many people.
Walking at an intense intensity will improve your aerobic fitness. You can still converse with friends, but there will be noticeable pauses between the words.
You don’t have to walk vigorously for you to benefit from aerobic fitness or health. A moderate pace will improve your aerobic fitness and, more importantly, your endurance (the capacity to perform activities longer without fatigue). It allows you to burn fat faster, increase oxygen delivery to the muscles, and improve mitochondrial density and efficiency.
Aerobic fitness can be improved by walking briskly for thirty minutes five days a week. Walking for 10 minutes three times a day is just as good as 30 minutes at once.
This guy can be taken around the block several times per day. It is just as effective as a longer session. From www.shutterstock.com
Strengthening Your Body
Although walking is not a strengthening exercise, if you’ve been inactive for a while, you will notice gains in your leg strength. Research suggests that walking for 30 minutes, five days a week, at a moderate pace can help prevent sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is a loss of muscle strength and size due to age.
By adding hills, taking the stairs, walking in undulating terrain, or carrying a backpack, you can put more pressure on the muscles and bones of your lower body. The best strength gains come from resistance exercises that use your body weight or are performed in a gym.
Flexibility
Walking regularly has positive effects on joints, even though it does not increase joint flexibility significantly. Walking and other weight-bearing exercises increase the lubrication of your joints, as well as their nutrition.
According to research, walking reduces the pain and disability of adults with knee arthritis. Moderate-intensity exercise is also beneficial for preventing joint degeneration.
Read more: Health Check: does sex count as exercise?
Body weight
Walking at a moderate intensity can help prevent weight gain and maintain a healthy weight with as little as 150 minutes hiked per week. The American College of Sports Medicine suggests 250 minutes of exercise or more to lose modest amounts of weight. However, the more time you spend exercising, the more weight you will lose.
It’s a common misconception that calories equal calories out. You can’t expect that a 500-calorie walk will offset the metabolic effects of a 500-calorie treat. Regular exercise and physical fitness will help reduce your risk for heart disease and premature death, regardless of whether you lose weight or not.
Walking is a great way to stay fit. We’ve done it for thousands of years, long before the first gym was opened. It’s a meditative, organic, natural experience, free of gluten, fat, and toxins. Walking has more health benefits than most other choices you make.
