Will Walking Help Me Lose Weight?

Will Walking Help Me Lose Weight?

Many people ask this question.  Let me state a few things up front.  If all you can do is walk because you have a physical limitation that prevents you from running then, yes, by all means walk.  No one has ever gained weight becaue they walked.  They gained weight because they ate half of a large pizza or a quart of ice cream along with their walking.  Walking will burn calories.  It just will not burn many calories.  On average a good brisk walk (not a leisurely walk) will burn about 250 calories every half hour.

Now assuming you were eating only enough to maintain your body weight prior to beginning a walking program you could expect to lose about 1 pound every two weeks or so.  But if you want to step up you fat loss then I would suggest you to pair your walking with interval training.

Let me be a little tough on you right now.  Excluding those who have a physical limitation, the rest of us are interested in walking merely becuae it is easy.  Many have the mindset to take the easy way out.  Honestly, there is no easy way to burn fat and lose weight.  It takes work; often it takes hard work.  But we gravitate to what takes little work.  Little work produces little results.  Hard work produces great results.

If you want to lose weight, I would recommend that you take up some form of interval training.  What is interval training?  In essence, interval training is a time of all out exercise followed by a time of low level exercise.  As an example, interval training might consist of running hard for 30 seconds followed by walking for one minute.  You would then repeat that cycle over and over again until you had reached your time goal or your distance goal.

In recent studies, it has been shown that an interval type training program burns much more fat than a steady state aerobics exercise like jogging.  To put it simply, if you did interval training for two miles you would burn more fat than if you jogged for 2 miles.

So the answer is walking can help you lose weight but it is more beneficial when included in an interval training regimin.  If you are interested in an exercise program that implements interval training you can read about it here.

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