Why Walking Is a Totally Underrated Way to Exercise and Lose Weight

CAN YOU WALK your way to weight loss?

First things first: Shedding pounds off the scale involves two key things: eating healthy and exercising regularly. As Kim Yawitz, R.D., trainer and gym owner in St. Louis, Mo., explains: to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you eat consistently.

When paired with eating well, walking may very well assist you in reaching that threshold. “Walking burns around 100 calories per mile, on average, and this can help you create a calorie deficit when paired with a reduced-calorie diet,” says Yawitz. “ I often recommend it for my new-to-exercise clients, simply because it’s beginner-friendly and easy on the joints.”

Ahead, how to make walking work for your weight loss goals, and two easy walking for weight loss plans.

6 Tips to Walk for Weight Loss

Walk More Than You Do Now

There’s no magic formula for how many steps, miles, or hours you have to walk to lose the amount of weight that you want. Starting out, the key is just to do more than you’re doing now. “If you have a job where you’re on your feet all day, you have to do more than that,” says Michele Stanten, founder of MyWalkingCoach.com and author of The Walking Solution. “But if you have a sedentary desk job, a walk every evening after dinner may show real results.”

A lot has been said about getting a baseline of about 10,000 steps a day for health reasons. If your goal is weight loss, you’ll likely want more than that once you get into a routine. But you don’t need to start right at 10,000. Get your baseline first. “If you’re only getting 3,000 steps on a typical day, don’t try to get 10,000 steps the next day. That can be really discouraging. Aim for 5,000 every day for a week. Then go up to 7,000 the next week,” she says.

Challenge Your Pace

The best way to take off extra weight is to challenge yourself with intervals—periods of faster walking interwoven with periods of slower walking. Research has found that interval walkers lose more weight than people who just go the same speed all the time. One study of people with type 2 diabetes found that interval walkers who alternated three minutes of fast walking with three minutes of average-speed walking not only helped their boost their fitness and control their blood sugar better than steady-state walkers, but their body composition also changed, leaving them with less belly fat and less body fat.

Of course, if you really want to change your body composition, you’ll want to add strength training to your life. Bonus: It helps you walk faster, Stanten says. Also remember that healthy management of stress, sleep, and food all contribute to weight loss, too.

Make It Your Thing

You don’t have to walk for hours every day to start losing weight, but it’s important to get in the habit of walking every day. Just make it part of your daily routine—something you do without even thinking about it—even if you’re only walking for 10 or 15 minutes on some days of the week.

Ideally, you’ll want two to three interval walks, or shorter, faster, higher-intensity walks a week, a couple hour-long ones, and the rest can be short, moderate-intensity ones. The shorter ones are great to do with your partner, your dog, a friend, or just head-clearing walks on your own.

Don’t just leave walking to your workout; do it wherever you can (the whole park the car farther away from the store thing). And taking the stairs is such familiar advice that it can fade to the background, but it burns more calories than walking on a flat surface and helps develop leg and glute muscles, too.

Use Inclines

Walking on an incline increases your heart rate, and helps activate your glutes, quadriceps and calves, according to Tyler Spraul, a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and the Head Trainer at Exercise.com. Depending on the incline, you can achieve similar benefits to running without adding stress on your joints, he explained to NBC News.

“Adding an incline is a great way to increase the challenge for your cardiovascular system and get the same kind of benefits that you can get from jogging or running without the same amount of wear and tear on your knees,” he says. “The extra effort burns more calories and, depending on your weight and cardiovascular endurance, can also burn more fat.”

Focus On Consistency

Yes, committing to your health and fitness takes work.

“Walking will only help you lose weight if you do it regularly. We all have those days when we don’t feel like working out, but a productivity hack called temptation bundling can help get you out the door,” says Yawitz. “Temptation bundling pairs an activity you don’t want to do with something you enjoy.”

Listen to a fun audiobook or podcast on your phone, that you’ll only listen to during workouts to get yourself excited to get moving.

Get The Right Gear

In addition to properly fitted sneakers, you’re also going to want to make sure you have on the right layers or jackets when you hit the pavement.

As Yawitz puts it, there’s no such thing as bad weather—only bad clothes. “Investing in a waterproof outer layer and warm gloves will keep you cozy and dry during those late-fall and winter walks,” she says.

Don’t Let Someone’s “Runner’s Superiority Complex” Get You Down

You burn as many calories if you walk at 5 MPH—“which is doable with training and practice,” Stanten says—than someone who’s jogging at that pace.

Sign Up for an Event

“One of the things that keeps people motivated about walking is signing up for an event,” says Stanten. Plenty of 5K and 10K races are walker-friendly. “Most people don’t know you can walk a half-marathon,” Stanten says. Some races are better than others for that. If it’s an in-person event, check time cutoffs carefully. If you’re not the event type, consider moving the whole walking experience to nature and checking out trails in your area.

Increase Your Heart Rate

Although you don’t need to go into a full-on run, or even a jog, picking up your walking speed can burn more calories because it increases heart rate. But don’t worry, there’s no need to sprint—you can get a good workout in by walking at a moderately intense pace. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a moderately intense workout can be obtained by raising your heart rate to 50 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate.

Ignore These 2 Walking Myths

Hand weights help you burn more calories

What they really do is make you walk more slowly, which cancels out any benefit of carrying extra weight. “You’ll get more bang for your buck by increasing your walking pace,” Stanten says.

To go faster, take longer steps

Exactly the opposite! To go faster, you need to shorten your stride and take more steps per minute. “When you reach your foot out in front of you too far, you get more impact on your knees and hips and your foot is acting as a brake,” Stanten says. To train yourself to shorten your steps, count how many steps you take per minute (or 30 seconds, if your mind drifts quickly) during a speed interval. Then try to take more steps than that for the next minute.

Try These Walking Workouts

Interval Walk

“Adding some fast intervals to your walk may help you burn more calories and can also make your workouts more exciting,” says Yawitz. Here’s her go-to plan for fast interval walks:

• Begin by walking for 5–10 minutes at a moderate pace.
• Then, alternate between speed walking (or even jogging) for one minute and walking at a moderate pace for one minute for a total of 20 minutes.
• Cool down with five to ten minutes of walking at a leisurely pace.

Now that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Trust us, lacing up your sneakers is half the battle.

Ruck Your Walk

This more “advanced” walking workout is great if you’re looking to get more fat-blasting potential out of your strolls. “Rucking is a great way to burn more calories while walking and build muscle in your core, legs, and shoulders,” says Yawitz. Here’s how to do it:

• To get started, wrap a 10-pound dumbbell in a blanket and place it in a sturdy backpack (the blanket will help keep the weight from bouncing around in your pack), or purchase one of our favorite weighted vests, here.
• Begin your workout by walking or marching in place for five minutes without your weighted pack.
• Place your bag on your back, adjust the straps until snug but comfortable, and walk for 20–25 minutes at a moderate pace. If this feels too easy, you can increase the weight by five pounds every couple of weeks, with a maximum load of 1/3 of the highest healthy body weight for your heigh.

If 20 to 25 minutes seems like too much for you to try from the outset, try the above for 10 to 15 minutes and build up your endurance from there.