However, lack of time has always been an excuse as to why people do not exercise. It may be because of work, school or other commitments. What you may not realize is the value that exercise can bring.

Why We Need Even the Smallest Amount of Exercise

Why do you need to exercise? Really, it is not just to burn those 100 calories (which you can do whenever you walk a mile!), it does so much more. When you exercise or stay active, your metabolic rate increases, hence, making you burn calories faster. This is true even after a few hours after exercising. Over the course of a few weeks, your metabolism will really speed up if you stick to an exercise program.

Don’t be Afraid of Gaining Muscle from Exercise

Walking to lose weight helps prevent the body from moving towards the starvation or hibernation response. This is where the body saves up the calories consumed for future use. By moving about, you are resisting the body’s attempt to move into this condition.

Some people may think that when they exercise, they gain more pounds because of the muscles that they get. The truth is they do gain a few pounds of lean tissue as they lose body fat. But in the end you have to be less focused on how much you weigh, but more concerned with how you look.

Still, the good thing about this is that lean tissue is required especially when you want to metabolize your body’s fat content. On the other hand, those who diet but do not get exercise lose out on lean tissue supply. Hence, they have decreased muscle tissue that could have helped metabolize fat.

How-to Walk to Lose Weight

So how do you obtain those muscles? For beginners, you should focus on the distance and time that you spend on walking. You increase the building of leg muscles (calves, quadriceps, and hamstrings) as you spend more time on walking. For those who have been walking for months or years, you will need to alter your walking style to build more muscles just from walking.

Learning to race-walk, you would be building new muscle and burning more calories per mile. For those who are not interested in race walking to build muscle, you should add some strength training to your weekly exercise schedule in addition to walking in order to build muscle.

Warm Up Before Intensive Walking

Every time you walk, you have to start with a warm-up type of exercise. It does not need to be strenuous right away. This is just to send signals from your brain to your body muscles and let them “know” that you plan to undergo something “heavy to the body” or be active for a while. A suggested warm up type of exercise is casual walking for a few minutes. Three minutes tops can do your body good. It will help prepare your body adjust to your exercise routine for the day.

If you immediately start on a high speed, your cells won’t get the signal that what you intend to do is a long term activity. As time goes by, increase the speed of your walk to be able to burn more calories. Do a cooling down walk at the end as well.

When you’re walking to lose weight for at least six hours a week, you also achieve better fitness and decrease your chance of getting heart disease, breast cancer, stroke, and diabetes. Keep in mind that having an active lifestyle truly brings a lot of benefits to you. So take your dog for a walk, the baby on a stroller, whatever it takes to get you out there!