Health: Walk for Weight Control #3

How to Walk for Weight Control

How far, fast, and long to burn fat

By Wendy Bumgardner, About.com

To lose weight and to keep it off, you need to get moving.

Walking Off Weight: Walking at a moderate pace for 30-60 minutes burns stored fat and can build muscle to speed up your metabolism. Walking an hour a day is also associated with cutting your risk of heart disease, breast cancer, colon cancer, diabetes and stroke. Isn't it time to work 1-hour walks into your busy lifestyle?

This tutorial will describe how walking burns calories and fat, what speed is appropriate, how long and how often to walk, and methods to track your activity.

How Fast to Walk for Weight Control

How fast to walk to burn fat

Warm-Up

First, you want to wake up your muscles and let them know you plan to be active for awhile. Walking at an easy warm-up pace for 5-10 minutes tells your muscles they can't just sit back and burn up the available sugars, they need to call on the fat reserves.

This is why you should not start off at a high speed - when you do that, your cells don't get the signal that this is a long-term activity, so instead they burn up sugars only.

Work-out

The speed to walk for optimal fat-burning is a "determined" pace.

• At this rate, you should be breathing noticeably but able to carry on a conversation in full sentences.
• Heart rate 60-70% of your maximum heart rate.
• Marilyn L. Bach in "Shapewalking" describes this as if you are on your way to an appointment, or up to 10 minutes late for an appointment.
• Walk at this speed for 30 minutes at a time, once you have built up to that duration. See the Absolute Beginner tutorial to build up to that duration.

Raising your Metabolism.

Good work, you've tricked your body into dipping into your fat stores for energy. You are also building muscle and raising your basal metabolic rate so you are burning more calories all day long.

But What If I Can't Walk That Much?

Start with the Absolute Beginners Tutorial, it will get you started the right way to build up to being able to walk for 30 minutes at the fat-burning pace. It also tells when to seek medical advice and how to avoid injury. Any amount of activity over your present level will help you achieve your weight loss goals, so go slow if that is what is comfortable.

Absolute Beginners Tutorial

Faster and Faster

Walking with racewalk style at paces under 13-minute miles will burn more calories per mile. I recommend this if you are already walking 20 miles a week as described above. In your case, to achieve more results purely from waking you may want to build speed as well as duration.