It is not revolutionary to suggest that walking is good for you. If you aren’t engaging in more strenuous exercise a good walk every day is enough to keep your plumbing clear, your joints mobile, and even satisfy your brain. It seems simple but yet, like most things you can complicate it if you want to. While we don’t want to unnecessarily complicate things and yes, a walk is always good for you, if you want to lose weight a new study suggests that you might want to vary your pace a touch as you go about your daily stroll.
A lot of research into walking takes place on a treadmill but these researchers observed that this is not really a reflection of the real world. In real life you change terrain as you walk and you will possibly vary your walking pace. Some studies of changes in pace have changed the pace of the treadmill to simulate these changes in pace but these researchers said that this means the treadmill is doing the work of making the change. To test how having to change pace yourself might impact the energy you burn while walking they asked subjects to vary their pace while keeping the pace of the treadmill constant.
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They found that walking at varying speeds burns up to 20 per cent more kilojoules than walking at a steady pace. This is because the very act of changing speed burns energy. To change the kinetic energy of your walk, your legs have to do work and that burns energy.
To achieve the kind of variations in pace that will burn kilojoules the researchers suggest walking with a backpack, walking with weights on your legs, walk and then stop for a while before resuming, or walk in a curve as opposed to a straight line. If walking in curve threatens the calm pedestrian balance of your local footpaths then the researchers suggest that you just do “weird things”. Those of you who have seen Monthy Python’s “Department of Silly Walks” sketch will relish the opportunity to pay homage to Python while losing weight as well.
