It’s so beautiful in Honolulu, HI, that it’s amazing more people aren’t walking to their destinations but using their cars instead. There are so many benefits for overall fitness, physical and mental. Walking may be inconvenient if your errand involves bulky boxes or is at a distance, but for short distances, it saves gas and improves your fitness. Barring physical limitations, it’s an easy exercise almost everyone can do, providing cardio and weight-bearing benefits.
Walking is an excellent supplement to a traditional exercise program.
Exercise is all about being more active. If you’re already pursuing a scheduled workout program, you can supplement it with walking. It increases cardiovascular efficiency, extends endurance, and boosts leg strength. Walking is also a good recovery activity. If you’ve overworked your body doing traditional workouts, resting the next day is advised. That doesn’t mean laying on the couch. It does mean doing light activity that stimulates circulation to speed recovery. That’s the perfect description of walking.
Walking can help prevent osteoporosis and slow or reverse it once it starts.
Weight-bearing exercises like walking can help prevent the bone-thinning of osteoporosis. Exercise causes muscles to tug on the bone. That tugging causes the bone to uptake calcium for strength to resist the tugging. If there’s no exercise, there’s no tugging. Calcium is leached from the bone causing bone thinning and osteoporosis. Walking builds muscle tissue to prevent osteopenia, the loss of muscle tissue that precedes osteoporosis.
You’ll reduce the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes when you walk.
Making your heart work a little harder is a good thing. If you don’t increase its efforts periodically, it becomes inefficient. Just like any muscle that you don’t use, it gets weaker. Walking keeps the heart pumping harder, boosting its strength. It also helps lower blood pressure by working large muscles in the legs. They produce nitric oxide that causes blood vessels to expand, making it easier for blood to flow and lowering blood pressure. It reduces bad cholesterol levels, helps you lose weight, and helps reduce the risk of insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes.
- Walking improves circulation, sending oxygen and nutrient-laden blood to all parts of the body, including the brain. Research shows that daily exercise like walking reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s, improves dementia, and lessens the symptoms of depression.
- Make your walking more effective by turning it into a HIIT—high intensity interval training—session. Just alternate the pace between peak intensity and recovery to do that. It burns more calories and gets faster results.
- For people who are overweight or those with joint issues, walking is superior to running. It’s a low-impact exercise so there’s no pounding motion.
- Walking also boosts your digestion, improves immune response, and reduces the risk of certain types of cancer. You can increase benefits by adding arm and leg weights when you walk.
For more information, contact us today at Hawaii Fit Camp!
