First of all, if you decide to walk, whether it’s to keep fit, lose weight, or simply improve your health, hooray for you! Take a bow, you’ve earned it!
Almost any ride will be of benefit, of course. However, some walks are more effective than others, depending on your goal. Let’s talk about a way to make walking for weight loss do more for the same effort.
Now, when you read articles on walking, running, and other exercise methods, you’ll often see the advice that if you can’t do everything at once, break it up and, for example, do two 20-minute walks instead of one 40-minute walk. .minute walk.
Good. You’ll experience health, fitness, and weight loss benefits either way. The health and fitness benefits will likely be essentially the same, depending, of course, on many factors besides the time of the hike itself. However, doing the entire walk at once will be much more effective for weight loss than breaking it up for one main reason.
Weight loss as a result of walking depends on two main factors: calories burned and fat burned.
They are not the same?
Well, no.
Here is a simple explanation. Now, this is just a quick overview, and professional dietitians could give you a much more detailed and expanded explanation…if you so choose. I’ll keep it basic.
When you eat food, some of it is used to create a substance called “glycogen” that is stored in your muscles. When you start to exercise, this glycogen is used as fuel for activity. However, the body cannot create glycogen fast enough to keep supplying it during a prolonged period of exercise. When this point is reached, the body begins to burn fat to continue providing energy.
So, you are walking briskly for 20 minutes. After all, a brisk 20-minute walk is a good exercise option, whichever way you look at it. However, you are walking to lose weight, and you want your walking to be as effective as possible.
Now, I’m going to use some numbers. They are just general averages that I am using to illustrate my point. You can burn more or less, or your neighbor can, so don’t get caught up in the numbers, just the concept.
Brisk walking can burn around 300 calories per hour. Sitting can burn around 60. Again, these are just generalities. A muscular person will burn more calories sitting and an overweight person will burn more walking.
Okay, take a 20-minute walk.
You burn about 100 calories. You do five of these rides in a week and burn 500 calories. That’s an average of 71 calories per day. If you burn or eliminate 100 calories a day, you can lose about 10 pounds a year.
Hey?
Yes!
Also, most of the energy you expend during a 15-20 minute walk will come from glycogen already stored in your muscles, and that will be replaced as quickly as possible by your body.
So, leaving a few other variables aside, your five 20-minute walks a week can help you lose about seven pounds a year.
Having learned this, you decide to double your walk, but you also decide to do two 20-minute walks a day. Well, by the time you do your second walk, your body will have replaced the glycogen, so your body will get the energy from it and burn another 100 calories.
By doubling your walking this way, you burn about 140 calories a day and lose about 14 pounds a year.
In fact, not even that much!
You see, during the 20 minutes you’re walking, you could have burned 20 calories anyway, so you really only burned an extra 80 calories per walk or 400 calories per week, 59 calories per day, to lose about 5.9 pounds per year. Walk twice a day for 20 minutes and you’ll lose about 11 pounds in a year.
So why walk?
Well, on the one hand, it’s very good for you. Even if you don’t lose much weight, you can improve your overall health, attitude, and energy level, and become a happier, more productive person. However, if you don’t walk the right way, you probably won’t lose much weight!
Remember glycogen?
When you walk for 40-45 minutes, you run out of glycogen somewhere midway.
So where does your body get the energy to keep going?
Burn fat!
When you burn fat, it disappears! Fat retains water, so the water also disappears.
If you sweat but don’t burn fat, fat, essentially a sponge, fills with water. If the fat is gone, not only is it gone, but so is the water it contained…and water is heavy.
So while walking is good for your health at almost any level, for best weight loss results, aim to walk 40-45 minutes at least 5 times a week.