Any regular reader of these pages might have noticed that we’re big fans of exercises that you can do for a minimal cost, or better yet, free.
While a gym membership is an invaluable resource and almost entirely unavoidable to someone who is taking their health and fitness regime with the correct degree of seriousness, those rolling hills and grey streetscapes outside your living room window can also have a lot to offer.
Walking. It is massively beneficial to your cardiovascular health and with weight management and, best of all, the vast majority of us have mastered it at a very, very young age. Better still, you don’t have to adjust your schedule to do it — just give yourself a little extra time and walk to the office instead of sitting in traffic for the 30 minutes every morning.
It is of minimal impact to your joints (particularly if you own a decent pair of running shoes) and can keep a lid on your high blood pressure or curb elevated blood pressure.
How much should you walk? Well, that will depend on your personal level of fitness, age, weight and various other factors but the general rule of thumb is to listen to your body and adjust your regime to what it tells you. 10,000 steps per day is the figure thrown around nowadays, supposedly popularised at the 1963 Olympics in Tokyo, reports Daily Star. Depending on your specifics, a 10,000 step walk can burn between 250 and 600 calories.
To put this into context your writer, a 6 ft 1 in tall, 170-pound male, hit almost 18,000 steps on a recent walk and per a tracking app on my phone that worked out to a total distance walked of 14.3 kilometres (8.9 miles) and yielded a calorie burn of 712.
Though, we stress, the 10,000 figure is a general figure and can’t be literally applied to everyone — it is just a good goal to work towards. A figure between 3,000 and 4,000 is considered the daily baseline for anyone of good-to-moderate health.
Other benefits can include improved blood glucose levels and, yep, that sweet endorphin rush which governs so many of our own workouts.
However, many of us will find adapting these things into our daily routines a difficult task in this rat race society we live in today so prepare to take walks on your lunchbreak, or get up from your desk every hour or two and walk somewhere for 15 minutes. It is even recommended to have a ‘walking meeting’ with business colleagues, instead of pooling around a meeting table.
Whichever way you slice it, walking (or its big brother, hiking) has almost nothing but positive benefits for us and can be easily adapted into almost any routine.
All that’s left is to go and do it.
