If you are able, walking is arguably the easiest and most effective way to get regular exercise for good health and fitness. After all, the learning curve is non-existent.
Ah, but is it really? The one way, in fact, the best way, to get the most benefit from your daily walk is to relearn how to walk, suggest numerous studies and a walking expert we spoke with who says the key to making your daily walk more effective is to simply shorten your stride.
“We’re so comfortable with walking that we tend to get lulled into a pace that’s energy-efficient,” says walking coach Michele Stanten, author of Walk Off Weight: Burn 3 Times More Fat with This Proven Program to Trim Your Belly, Butt and Back Fat. Too energy efficient. “We’re not burning enough calories.”
Hundreds of studies have shown that the more you walk the better for all sorts of health reasons: weight loss, lower blood pressure and blood sugar, a better cholesterol profile, stress reduction, improvements in mood, memory, and brainpower, and longevity. (See: What Happens To Your Body When You Walk Every Day.) But the quicker you walk the more efficient and effective your effort will likely be.
“The big mistake most walkers make is taking too long of a stride,” says Stanten. “When your foot lands straight out in front of you it acts almost like a brake and slows you down. By shortening your stride you’ll walk faster and burn more calories.”
How a shorter stride and interval walking can make your walk more effective.
That’s the critical, ahem, step in taking your walk to a new level with a training technique called intervals.
Interval walking is nothing more than walking at a brisk to fast pace for a short period of time, say 30 seconds, followed by 30 seconds to a minute or more of recovery at a slow to moderate pace. Done correctly, interval walking can be challenging, but the potential payoffs are pretty big.
For one, you’ll save time: A 3.5 mph pace will get you home a lot quicker than a leisurely 1.5 mph pace and make it easier to fit a walk into your busy day. Also, just as in other forms of interval training, interval walking—”pushing yourself out of your comfort zone,” says Stanten—increases calorie burn.
The benefits of interval walking.
Danish research presented in Diabetes Care studied people with type 2 diabetes who were randomly assigned to either a continuous-pace walking group that walked at a steady moderate speed or an interval walking group that alternated 3-minute repetitions at low and high intensity. After four months, researchers found that only the interval walkers improved their blood-sugar levels, reduced their BMI (Body Mass Index), and lost dangerous visceral belly fat.
In a related study published in 2015 in the journal Biology Letters, Ohio State University researchers found that walking at varying speeds can burn up to 20% more calories compared to maintaining a steady pace. The researchers put participants on a treadmill set at a steady speed and asked them to walk quickly to the front of the treadmill or slowly moving to the back of the treadmill belt while they monitored their respiration. Their analysis showed that the very act of changing speeds burns more energy because the legs must do more work to move from a slow to a fast pace and vice versa. The researchers estimated that up to eight percent of the energy we use in normal daily walking could be due to the energy needed to speed up and slow down.