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Walk off weight
To lose weight and to keep it off, you need to get moving.
Walking Off Weight: Walking at a moderate pace for 30-60 minutes burns stored fat and can build muscle to speed up your metabolism. Walking an hour a day is also associated with cutting your risk of heart disease, breast cancer, colon cancer, diabetes and stroke. Isn't it time to work 1-hour walks into your busy lifestyle?
Weight is determined mostly by the balance of calories - how many you burn vs. how many you eat each day. To lose weight, you need to increase your activity to burn more and/or eat fewer calories each day.
Calories and Weight
A pound of fat equals 3500 calories. To lose 1 pound a week you will need to expend 3500 more calories than you eat that week, whether through increased activity or decreased eating or both. Losing 1-2 pounds of fat a week is a sensible goal, and so you will want to use the combination of increased activity and eating less that will total 3500 calories for 7 days.
How You Burn Calories
Your weight x distance = energy used walking. Time does not matter as much as distance. If you speed up to walking a mile in 13 minutes or less, you will be burning more calories per mile.
But for most beginning walkers, it is best to increase the distance before working on speed. A simple rule of thumb is 100 calories per mile for a 160 pound person.
Note About the Calories Chart
You burn more calories per mile at very low speeds because you are basically stopping and starting with each step and your momentum isn't helping to carry you along. Meanwhile, at very high walking speeds you are using more muscle groups with arm motion and with a racewalking stride. Those extra muscles burn up extra calories with each step. Running may burn more calories per mile as there is an up and down motion lifting your weight off the ground as well as moving it forward
How fast to walk to burn fat
Warm-Up
First, you want to wake up your muscles and let them know you plan to be active for awhile. Walking at an easy warm-up pace for 5-10 minutes tells your muscles they can't just sit back and burn up the available sugars, they need to call on the fat reserves.
This is why you should not start off at a high speed - when you do that, your cells don't get the signal that this is a long-term activity, so instead they burn up sugars only.
Work-out
The speed to walk for optimal fat-burning is a "determined" pace.
At this rate, you should be breathing noticeably but able to carry on a conversation in full sentences.
Heart rate 60-70% of your maximum heart rate.
Marilyn L. Bach in "Shapewalking" describes this as if you are on your way to an appointment, or up to 10 minutes late for an appointment.
Walk at this speed for 30 minutes at a time, once you have built up to that duration. See the Absolute Beginner tutorial to build up to that duration.
Raising your Metabolism
Good work, you've tricked your body into dipping into your fat stores for energy. You are also building muscle and raising your basal metabolic rate so you are burning more calories all day long.
Posted by Beauty Salon on August 6, 2006 11:35 AM | Permalink
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