Walking Your Way To Fitness - On A Tight Schedule

The doctor and exercise gurus prescribe 30 minutes of aerobic exercise per day. What happens if you do not have thirty minutes at a time to spend exercising?

Well, never fear…

Research shows that you can gain the same healthful benefit by upping your daily activity throughout the day – walking more. Here’s some steps to get you started towards better health through walking.

The Gear

The first thing you will need is to purchase a pedometer. A pedometer measures the number of steps that you take during the day. By measuring the number of steps per day, you can create daily goals to achieve and gradually increase the number of steps per day.

How many steps do you take per day?

The next step is to measure the number of steps that you are currently taking. By wearing the pedometer from the moment, you awake to the time to lie down at night. You many be surprise by the amount of activity that you actually get per day. In fact, it’s estimated that 39.9% of adults spend most of their day sitting.

How do you rate?

The average stride length of an adult is about 2.5 feet long. That means about 2000 steps equals about 1 mile. It is now recommend for good health to increase our amount of steps to about 10,000 or 5 miles per day.

A sedentary person only takes about 1000 to 3000 steps per day. If you are a sedentary person, start out slowly and gradually increase your steps. For example, if you perform 3000 steps per day, shoot for 3500 per day for the next two weeks. Increase the number of steps by 500 per day every two weeks.

The health benefits for only a small increase of 500 steps per day is huge.

How do you increase your steps?

There are many ways to increase your daily output of steps by simply adjusting your daily habits.

• Park farther away from the store.
• Walk the dog
• Take a walk with co-workers at lunch
• Take the stairs instead of the elevator
• Enjoy a walk at the park with a spouse, friend, and children
• Stroll around your neighborhood
• Walk to a friend’s house to visit

Track your progress

Tracking your progress will keep you motivated and provide daily and weekly goals. Write the number of steps and mileage each day. Also, journaling the process with personal notes on how you feel, how you look, and the other healthful things you added to your life will reinforce the positive steps that you have taken towards a new level of health.