The Powerful Health and Weight Loss Benefits from a 5-Minute Walk
By: Rhys Burton
Tags: Wellness, Weight Loss, Healthy Lifestyle, Life, Health

The idea of keeping it simple is embraced by our community on a daily basis, with open arms in most facets of life. Apart from our exercise. Unless a behavior is categorised as challenging or potentially unattainable, it’s assumed that it won’t stick or isn’t worth doing in the first place.

Lending oneself to this concept of reality isn’t just likely to result in burnout and potential injury, but it’s also a large factor in why a large number of people struggle to see results, become frustrated and as a result, miss out on all the easier and more attainable ways of developing healthy habits.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to put in time and effort. However, the time and effort required to establish that difference in your health and wellbeing are significantly less than what you would initially think.

Now, whether you’re looking for a place to begin your routine, or you’re trying to develop a consistent plan that will lead to small changes and will result in a significant outcome, it’s time for you to walk. Yep. Literally. I’m going to outline why and how to start implementing walking into your healthy living fat loss journey.

Is Walking Better Than Running?

There is a clear-cut difference between the concept of “healthy habits” and “fat loss habits”. But, the concept is incredibly hard to truly grasp.

Simply because something is healthy, it does not mean that following that action diligently will lead to fat loss. You can eat a lot of healthy foods, but if you eat too much of it and consistently reach a calorie surplus for an extended period of time, you’ll gain weight.

Photo by i yunmai on Unsplash

On the other hand, just because one habit leads to tremendous fat loss, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a healthy habit. Like the flip side of the other example, if you don’t refuel your body and routinely land yourself in a large calorie deficit, you’ll lose weight.

This concept is also true within the exercise world. Far too often, people become fixated on this notion of the “best type” of exercise. A rabbit hole they will end up in longer than they would apply their time to actually exercising.

Photo by Arek Adeoye on Unsplash

Certain types of exercise, such as weightlifting, can be more efficient for weight loss. Some may argue that weightlifting is more effective for fat loss than running.

The right answer is constructed from an equation of time, goals, and capabilities. Granted, if you go for a run and maintain a high intensity, you will burn a high number of calories (relative to you). But how likely are you to repeat this, consistently? What is your end goal? Do you even want to get better at running? Did you even want to go for a run in the first place?

Let's imagine that you ran 2 days per week for 45 minutes at a time. But let’s say that you hated every single minute of it, which led to physical and emotional aches and pains, which leads to you becoming a sporadic runner at best.

Now let’s compare that to walking 5 days per week for 30 minutes at a brisk pace, jamming out to your favorite audiobook. Shoutout to Audible.

In my case, I walk my dog Barney for an hour a day, 6 times per week. His health is sometimes more important to me than my own. Dog owners will understand.

My Walking Partner

Your total number of minutes exercising per week would increase (150 minutes vs 90 minutes), as well as the frequency of your movement (5 days vs 2 days per week). This can raise your levels of motivation as well as reducing transient forces acting on your joints. If that is something you’re looking to reduce, of course.

Furthermore, if you take part in other variants of exercise (weight training or game sports), walking could function as a form of active recovery. Therefore increasing recovery time and morale.

So, is walking “better” than running? Maybe not on a minute-by-minute comparison, but it could be a healthier and more consistent option for you.

Can Walking Help With Fat Loss?

Walking doesn’t make headlines because it’s not sexy and isn’t a desirable physical skill. We crave learning how to do a muscle-up but won’t stick to it if we don’t have immediate success with it. But walking gets the job done much better than people think, as long as you put in the consistent effort.

Think of every step you take as a small win and a literal step closer to forming a healthy habit. In 2011, researchers found that taking a 5-minute walking break every hour could burn an extra 660 calories per week.

Meaning that over course of one year, you could lose about 9 to 10 pounds just by adding up the 5-minute walks.

Of course, over an 8-hour day, that amounts to 40 minutes of walking per day for at least 5 days per week. And not everyone can get up every hour to go for a walk. It’s a commitment, but even if you did half of that amount, you can still see a difference and more importantly, feel the difference.

Adam Meakins, a fantastic physiotherapist who I truly recommend everyone should follow on Twitter and Instagram, has a great saying to partner his more well know catchphrase “you can’t go wrong getting strong”:

“Steps, steps, steps. You must respect the steps!”

Some well-known celeb trainers, such as Harley Pasternak, are best known for their focus on daily steps as a foundation for health and fat loss. He sets a goal of 12,000 steps per day for his A-list clientele. some of which include: Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, LL Cool J, and Adam Levine.

Photo by Kyle Mills on Unsplash

For the vast majority of us, you don’t need to model what celebs do (especially when it requires spending lots of money on equipment that they’ve probably been sent by a sponsor just for the exposure). But, if walking can work for them, then why wouldn’t it for you? At the very least, give it a try yourself. After all, it is free!

Proven Health Benefits Of Walking

The health benefits of walking should not be understated, and research shows that it is undeniably good for you.

In 2018, research emerged from the Netherlands that compared different types of exercise and movement (or lack of in some cases) on health markers (the indicators as to how healthy you really are). The study looked into the specific effects of:

Sitting Standing Exercise (occasionally)

Each of these physical states were stated to have a measurable impact on your body in as little as four days.

Researchers recruited 61 adults — some who were healthy, some overweight, and some overweight and diabetic. None were exercisers prior to the study (please refer to the paper to see how this was defined). The scientists then had the group follow three different living patterns, each for four straight days at a time. The patterns were:

14 hours a day of sitting, getting up only to use the bathroom

13 hours of sitting + 1 hour of moderate exercise

8 hours of sitting + 6 hours of standing or strolling around

FYI I have days throughout my week where all of these scenarios can be true. Such is the life of working and studying during a pandemic. We aren’t perfect and never will be.

Participants underwent a series of health tests before and after each block. The results indicated: