Daily walking provides numerous benefits
Walking can offer health benefits to people of all ages and fitness levels. It’s free and easy to fit into your daily routine. All you need to start is a sturdy pair of walking shoes.
1. Burn Calories
Walking can help you burn calories and burning calories can help you maintain or lose weight.
Your actual calorie burn will depend on several factors, including walking speed, distance covered, terrain (you’ll burn more calories walking uphill than on a flat surface) and your weight. You can determine your actual calorie burned through a calorie calculator.
2. Strengthen the Heart
Walking at least 30 minutes a day, five days a week can reduce your risk for coronary heart disease by about 19 percent. Your risk may reduce even more when you increase the duration or distance you walk per day.
3. Help Lower Blood Sugar
A small study found that taking a 15-minute walk three times a day (after breakfast, lunch, and dinner) improved blood sugar levels more than taking a 45-minute walk at another point during the day.More research is needed to confirm these findings, though. Consider making a post-meal walk a regular part of your routine.
4. Eases Joint Pain
Walking can help protect the joints, including your knees and hips. It helps lubricate and strengthen the muscles that support the joints.
5. Boost Your Energy
Going for a walk when you’re tired may be a more effective energy boost than grabbing a cup of coffee. Walking increases oxygen flow through the body. It can also increase levels of cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. Those are the hormones that help elevate energy levels.
6. Improve Your Mood
Walking can help your mental health. Studies show it can help reduce anxiety, depression, and negative moods. It can also boost self-esteem and reduce symptoms of social withdrawal.
To experience these benefits, aim for 30 minutes of brisk walking or other moderate intensity exercise three days a week. You can also break it up into three 10-minute walks.
7. Extend Your Life
Walking at a faster pace could extend your life. Researchers found that walking at an average pace compared to a slow pace resulted in a 20 percent reduced risk of overall death. But walking at a brisk or fast pace (at least four miles per hour) reduced the risk by 24 percent. The study looked at the association of walking at a faster pace with factors like overall causes of death, cardiovascular disease, and death from cancer.
8. Tone your legs
Walking can strengthen the muscles in your legs. To build up more strength, walk in a hilly area or on a treadmill with an incline or find routes with stairs. Trade off walking with other cross-training activities like cycling or jogging. You can also perform resistance exercises like squats, lunges, and leg curls to further tone and strengthen your leg muscles.
9. Creative thinking
Walking may help clear your head and help you think creatively. A study that included four experiments compared people trying to think of new ideas while they were walking or sitting. Researchers found participants did better while walking, particularly while walking outdoors. The researchers concluded that walking opens up a free flow of ideas and is a simple way to increase creativity and get physical activity at the same time.
– Healthline.com
