Walking to lose fat?
With obesity and disease increasing dramatically, many fitness experts recommend walking to lose weight and stay in shape. Some even go so far as to say that walking is the best way to burn fat and lose weight. I strongly disagree with this and will show you why walking is NOT effective for burning body fat.
Yes, you read it right…
Walking is NOT effective for burning body fat and if your goal is to lose fat, you may be wasting your time. I’m not saying that walking isn’t beneficial, I’m saying that if fat loss is your primary goal, there are much better options out there that will give much better results.
The main benefits of walking are increased blood flow and circulation, better recovery, and a strengthened immune system. There are several reasons why walking is not the best option when it comes to losing fat. Here are a few:
- Walking does NOT burn many calories. The lower the intensity of the activity or exercise, the lower the number of calories burned per unit of time. For example, you can burn more calories in 15 minutes of bicycling at a high intensity level than in 45 minutes of easy walking.
- Walking does NOT result in a huge increase in metabolism. Another downside to walking is that because it is generally low intensity, it only produces a small increase in metabolism that will last for about 1-2 hours after the walk. On the other hand, the metabolism increases are greater and last longer (4-24 hours or more) when you do high-intensity cardio.
- Walking DOES NOT deplete muscle glycogen Low-intensity exercise such as walking does not deplete muscle glycogen levels, and therefore later in the day if you have excess calories, they are likely to be stored as body fat, whereas if depletes glycogen, excess calories will be stored primarily in the muscles.
So why do so many fitness and health experts recommend walking for weight loss? One of the reasons is that people don’t want to hear that they have to work hard, so they think that some activity is better than none. Another reason is that the body burns more fat for fuel when exercising at an easy pace, yet the total amount of energy used is so small that you end up burning little body fat. That’s also why when you choose the “fat burning” program on your treadmill or bike, it makes exercising at any level easy. Yes, you are burning fat, but so little that you would have to exercise at that easy pace for hours on end every day.
High intensity cardio/aerobic exercise is much more effective at burning excess body fat. In fact, several studies have been conducted to prove this. In one study, they compared a group that did moderate-level aerobic exercise for 45 minutes with another group that did high-intensity exercise for 15 minutes. They did fitness tests before and after, including analysis of body fat, and found that the group that did high-intensity aerobics lost nine times more body fat!
Do you want more evidence?
Compare the bodies of a walker, a marathon runner, and a sprinter. If you are unfamiliar with what a sprinter’s body looks like, it is very muscular and has little body fat, while on the other hand, a walker’s body will probably have the opposite, little muscle and more fat. The sprinter does little to no low-intensity exercise and mostly does short, hard bursts of work, while the marathon runner overtrains so much that he burns both body fat and muscle and thus tends to look almost sickly thin.
So what should you do if your main goal is to shed those pounds of excess body fat?
Two things:
- Do some form of high-intensity cardio 2-4 times a week.
- Stabilizes blood sugar to minimize new fat storage.
I know some of you are now saying “I can’t do high intensity exercise, I have a bad knee” and don’t worry, I have a solution for you. The good news is that high intensity is up to you and your current fitness level. For example, going up and down hills fast may be high intensity for you… it all depends. So don’t think you have to start running or something. Just start slowly increasing the intensity of your cardio while you can also decrease the time because you can work hard or you can work long.
Plus, you can do almost any high-intensity activity or exercise… here are a few examples:
- increase your speed
- use a slope or hills
- increase stamina
- perform intervals (the most effective method)
Obviously, some exercises/activities are more suitable than others, but the point is that if you want to burn more fat and make your workouts as productive as possible, you need to increase the intensity.
For more information on high-intensity cardio, see the following articles:
- Forget the Fat Burning Zone – http://www.achieve-fitness.com/forget.htm
- In search of the ideal aerobic routine – http://www.achieve-fitness.com/ideal.htm
- Heart Rate Guidelines – http://www.achieve-fitness.com/cardio.htm
Be sure to also check out my Burn Fat FAST! Ebook and audio program here: http://www.burn-fat-fast.com – Covers everything from cardio to strength training to nutrition and more.
As with any change to your fitness program, be careful not to overdo it. Just because high-intensity workouts burn more fat, don’t think you’ll get better results if you do them every day; that will quickly lead to overtraining and muscle loss, which will only make it even harder to burn fat. fat.
So if your primary goal is fat loss, don’t waste time walking and instead focus on progressive, high-intensity cardio to maximize the effectiveness of your workouts.