Walking for weight loss is a great way to get the ball rolling towards fitness. If you have not engaged in any exercise for number of years and you have reached the decision that you want to lose weight and are really prepared to do something about it, then exercise will play a major and vital role in your success.

Conventional wisdom suggests that you will have to do cardio 3 or 4 times a week for at least half an hour. Cardio exercises may include running, jogging, cycling, stepper, and aerobics and so on. However at the point of starting your fitness levels at the present time may not allow you to do these types of exercises. If you try to push yourself too hard, all that will happen is that you will give up trying and come to detest whatever cardio exercise you are doing.

Fitness and weight loss is progressive. Meaning that it is going to take time to get to where you want to be, and that it has to be done in stages. You are not going to start exercising on Monday and be fit the following Sunday. The same can be said of trying to lose weight. The more you try to force yourself initially, the less chance of success you will have. You need to accept where you are now and what your capabilities are at the present time. Once you have done this, realize that as long as you keep doing what you need to be doing on a regular basis, and increase in small steps, then you will eventually reach your goals.

Walking is a good way to start building your fitness levels so that you can do more different and difficult cardio exercise further down the road. The first thing you will need to do will be to make up a walking program, consisting of where you will walk, how long for, and how often. Previous generations were forced to walk everywhere as there were not many cars. There was never an issue of obesity or weight related problems for these generations.

There are many ways how you can incorporate walking for weight loss into your life. Find a park and walk around it, try to keep a brisk place and see how you feel after you have been around it once. If you feel it was ok try another lap. To keep losing weight and to keep getting fitter you must be progressive. This means you should always do more than you did last time. Even if it’s only an extra 50 or 100 yards, you should always increase what you do. The more you do the fitter you get, the fitter you get the more you can do.

The best thing about walking is that it is free; there is no need for any gym fees and no need for equipment, apart from some comfortable walking shoes. As you become fitter and are able to do more and more laps, it will at some point become a little boring. It’s fine when you are doing a few laps and you find that a little challenging. However after a month or two when you are doing 15, 20 or even more laps, you will began to become a little bored at having to walk for this amount of time.

Get yourself a personal CD player or even an mp3 player, which is relatively cheap to buy these days. Fill the mp3 player with lots of your favourite songs and listen to them as you walk. This gives your brain something else to focus on apart from the drudgery of walking greater distances.

A time will come when the walking becomes too easy. When you reach this stage, look back at how much you were doing to begin with compared to how much you may be doing now. You will find that you have improved beyond measure. This should make you feel proud and let you see how much improvement you are capable of. This should then motivate you to go to the next level.

The next level could consist of various methods; it will depend on your preferences. You could start jogging or running instead of walking. You could find an area of hills and begin walking up and down them. Hill walking is a fantastic way to get fit and burn calories. You could start cycling, start using a stepper, join an aerobics class; there are lots of different ways to improve.

Whatever next step you take you should follow the same pattern as before. Always do a little more than before. Your body can improve far beyond what you may think at the moment. Your body was designed to adapt and cope with change, and this is a fact. It will get fitter, leaner, and stronger and endure more, to cope with what you are doing, as long as you keep doing more in small steps Start getting the benefits and begin walking for weight loss.

By Terry Sandhu
easierwayz.com

Walking for health, fitness, and/or weight loss in any combination is easy to get into. You put on your shoes, head out the door and then you…walk! Oh sure, there are some more complicated instructions if you really want to get into walking as a big deal, but most people just want to know how to get started and what it will do for them.

Well, walking regularly, in addition to helping you lose weight, will help improve your posture, strengthen your cardiovascular system, tune up your immune system, elevate your mood, and, as any good exercise program will, help decrease your risk for various cancers, high blood pressure, strokes, type II diabetes, and help ward off many of the events and changes associated with aging.

Now, that “walking for weight loss” program you read in the magazine might or might not work for you for several reasons. The good news, however, is that you can easily come up with your own tailor-made walking program which should work just as well.

Many times, the program, as you read about it in the magazine, is essentially the finished product. Whoever the article is about arrived at that program after some personal trial and error. It is also a program that fits into their schedule, and probably also fits into their personal state of fitness and fitness training choices. It’s not that this is bad, but it may make the program misleading or counterproductive for you.

The basic rule to begin tailoring any exercise program to your own needs is to start small or easy and build up. The magazine may be showing you a walking program that is too advanced for you. If this is so, it is not a problem. All you have to do is walk the distance and pace that is comfortable for you. As you reach levels where you are sure that you are comfortable with what you are doing, increase the distance slightly. You will also notice over time that your walks, while the same distance, are taking less time to complete. If this is happening regularly over a few days, increase the distance.

There is no set starting distance or duration of exercise that you should worry about if you are starting or building up. I know of many people who began their walking programs by only going a few feet. That was all they could do, but they did it. Eventually, walking for weight loss should last about 45 minutes, and you should do it between three and five days a week, although obviously five days would be best.

While the walking will produce the most benefits if done in one 45 minute session, you can do 15 minutes on your morning and afternoon break and 15 minutes at lunch (or 10, 10, and 25 - be creative) if you cannot find time to work it in any other way. At any level, you can make your walking more interesting by walking in different places, taking different routes, or walking with a group.

Once you are regularly walking 45 minutes a day, five days a week, you will want to challenge yourself a little more and try to cut your time. Don’t worry if you can’t bring it down much…or at all. The very effort will repay you. At this time, you may find yourself becoming interested in other walking related activities such as hiking or even other fitness activities.

This is good, because not only can you make your walking for weight loss program more interesting by substituting other activities such as swimming, rowing, biking or kayaking for the walking itself, but you will begin to feel capable of adding other fitness activities to your repertoire.

This is a valuable step because walking will only take you so far, and adding a strength and muscle training activity such as weight lifting could be an important addition to your exercise program. Walking, as great an overall exercise as it is for health, fitness, and weight loss, does not help much with upper body strength (what you use to carry the grandkids or a sack of groceries). Weight lifting, or other resistance training, will also help build lean muscle mass which will help boost your resting metabolic rate, allowing your body to burn more calories even when at rest.

A quick note on the term “weight lifting”. Many people will be worried about becoming “muscle bound” or “bulky”, and ladies especially may be concerned about becoming in some way less feminine if they train with weights. If the training is done properly, most people, ladies and gentlemen should mainly notice better health and increased strength and stamina as well as weight loss. The body builders, both male and female, seen in the magazines have chosen specific training routines and dedicated themselves to rigorous dietary practices and supplementation to achieve those particular results.

Finally, any exercise as part of a weight loss program is less about what exercise is chosen or how well it is performed and more about how regularly it is performed.

As always, regular moderate exercise, be it walking for weight loss or some other program, coupled with healthy eating practices will produce a trimmer, healthier body and open new doors to the enjoyment of life.

By Donovan Baldwin