21 Benefits of Fitness Walking with The Fitness Walking Exercise Program
Walking, it’s something we’ve done since being able to stand upright as toddlers. So, you may be asking, “how much more do I need to know about walking?” And, “why do I need an audio program to help me get in shape?” This post, 21 Benefits of Fitness Walking with The Fitness Walking Exercise Program will answer all your questions.
Walk allows your mind to wander and problem solve!
Throughout this website, I’ve been singing the praises of walking (just in case you missed the website name: Walking for Health and Fitness), and the question I’m asked most often is “can I really get into great shape by just walking?”. YES, YOU CAN! I enthusiastically reply every time.
Now let’s clear up the term “get in great shape.” I’m referring to cardiovascular fitness when I say “shape.” Volumes of research have been done in regards to the positive effects walking has on the body. I stand by every benefit I’ve highlighted on this site.
Longevity, quality of life, better sleep, a positive mindset… all are benefits of walking.
In this post I would like to explain my term, “fitness walking.”
In this case, fitness walking is adding additional exercises to your walking routine to enhance the benefits you gain already gain by walking.
Read on about why this program is a sure-fire way for you to get into great shape and look forward to doing the workout every day!
Why Fitness Walking:
Walking increases your overall cardio fitness, your legs, back, core, and arms (when you pump them vigorously) and adding basic bodyweight exercises will supercharge the fitness effect of walking.
By adding pushups, squats, lunges, and shoulder planks, you incorporate all the major muscle groups in the body thereby boosting your overall fitness level.
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21 Benefits of Fitness Walking:
Walking Prevents Heart Disease: Walking is a form of aerobic exercise and is one of the easiest ways to increase your physical activity and improve your health. Exercise also increases your lungs' ability to take in oxygen, lowers blood pressure, helps to reduce body fat, and improves blood sugar and cholesterol levels. Read: Benefits of Fitness Walking - 3 Ways to Build a Strong Body and Heart.
Reduce stress: Walking and exercise, in general, produce endorphins in the body. Endorphins are the “feel good” chemicals your brain produces. Endorphins act as a natural painkiller and also help improve your ability to sleep.
Ward off anxiety and feelings of depression: The act of walking or exercising helps you break the cycle of negative thoughts that feeds depression and anxiety. Also, as stated above, endorphins play a role in helping your sense of well-being. Read: Benefits of a 15-Minute Walk.
Boost self-esteem: Endorphins boost your mood. Over a longer period of time, exercise makes you feel good about your physical health
Sense of accomplishment. Whether short or long term, walking or exercising consistently will boost your confidence.
Improve sleep: Sleep helps our body Repair the organ systems including our muscles, immune systems, and other hormones. Read Sleep: Nature’s Nurse
Increases your metabolism leading to weight loss: Building lean muscle mass by doing bodyweight fitness exercises can slightly increase your resting metabolic rate (the number of calories your body burns while at rest). Also, vigorous exercise can increase your metabolic rate for hours after exercise.
Improves Circulation: Exercise improves your body’s ability to take in and use oxygen by making blood vessels dilate. It also wards off heart disease, brings up the heart rate, lowers blood pressure and strengthens the heart. Women who walked 30 minutes a day reduced their risk of stroke by 20 percent, and by 40 percent when they stepped up the pace, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.
Improves back pain: Walking strengthens muscles that support the spine, increases blood flow to muscles which helps flush out the toxins that lead to pain. Pain often restricts mobility. Walking helps to improve your range of motion and flexibility. You will find that your posture improves as well as your mood. A stronger body and increased flexibility help to prevent injury.
Stops loss of bone mass: Bodyweight fitness training strengthens muscles and reduces bone loss. Bone is living tissue that responds to exercise by becoming larger.
Lightens your mood: Exercise stimulates the production of endorphins, the “feel-good” brain chemicals. A California State University, Long Beach, study showed that the more steps people took during the day, the better their moods were. Read: Benefits of Getting Outside
Strengthens muscles: Walking tones your leg and abdominal muscles– and even arm muscles-- if you pump them as you walk. This increases your range of motion, shifting the pressure and weight away from your joints and muscles, which are meant to handle the weight, helping to lessen arthritis pain. Bodyweight exercise stimulates muscle growth.
Supports your joints: The majority of joint cartilage has no direct blood supply. It gets its nutrition from the synovial or joint fluid that circulates as we move. The impact that comes from movement or compression, such as walking, “squishes” the cartilage, bringing oxygen and nutrients into the area.
Improve your breathing: When walking and exercising, your breathing rate increases, causing oxygen to travel faster through the bloodstream, helping to eliminate waste products and improve your energy level and the ability to heal.
Slows mental decline: A study of 6,000 women, ages 65 and older, performed by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that age-related memory decline was lower in those who walked more. The women walking 2.5 miles per day had a 17-percent decline in memory, as opposed to a 25-percent decline in women who walked less than a half-mile per week.
Lowers your risk of Alzheimer’s disease: A study from the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville found that men between the ages of 71 and 93 who walked more than a quarter of a mile per day had half the incidence of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, compared to those who walked less.
Walking Prevents Cancer: Exercise has many biological effects on the body, some of which have been proposed to explain associations with specific cancers, including lowering the levels of hormones, such as insulin and estrogen, and of certain growth factors that have been associated with cancer development and progression.
Walking Prevents Obesity: Walking helps to prevent obesity and decrease the harmful effects of obesity, particularly the development of insulin resistance (failure of the body's cells to respond to insulin) by reducing inflammation and improving immune system function. Exercise, in general, alters the metabolism of bile acids, resulting in decreased exposure of the gastrointestinal tract to these suspected carcinogens thus limiting the amount of time it takes for food to travel through the digestive system, which decreases gastrointestinal tract exposure to possible carcinogens. Read: Does 10,000 Steps Keep the Doctor Away
Walking Prevents Diabetes: One possible reason why: when you perform a moderate exercise—like walking three miles—your body taps into its stores of fatty acids to fuel it more than it does when you exercise vigorously, like if you jogged the same distance. That’s good news for your diabetes risk as an elevated level of free fatty acids can make it harder for your body to process the hormone insulin.
Type 2 Diabetes: A 2012 study of 201 people with type 2 diabetes found that every additional 2,600 steps (approximately 1 mile) of walking each day was associated with a 0.2% lower A1c.
Pre-diabetes/Overweight/Obese: A 2007 analysis, which included five studies examining walking and the risk of type 2 diabetes (data from a staggering 301,221 people), found that those who walked regularly--about 20 minutes per day-- had a 30% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Improve your mindset: A positive mindset comes from a sense of accomplishment. By walking you are acknowledging your responsibility for your health and taking steps to improve your physical and emotional wellbeing. Mark Twain said “twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So Sail (or walk) away from the safe harbor. Explore. Dream. Discover. Getting in the Zone in 5 Easy Steps will accelerate you to peak performance.
Leads to a longer life: Research out of the University of Michigan Medical School and the Veterans Administration Ann Arbor Healthcare System says those who exercise regularly in their fifties and sixties are 35 percent less likely to die over the next eight years than their non-walking counterparts. That number shoots up to 45 percent less likely for those who have underlying health conditions.
Research published in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that average walking speed turned out to be a consistent predictor of survival length across age, race and height categories, but it was especially useful in zeroing in on life expectancy for those who still live and get around independently and for those older than 75.
READ: INCREASE AVERAGE WALKING SPEED WITH MORE “STEPS”
A POWERFUL INDICATOR OF LIFE EXPECTANCY
It’s clear to see that walking for health and fitness is the easiest way to get in shape and stay in shape! Con
Benefits of Strength Training:
An Effective strength training regimen promotes the release of vital “youth” hormones:
Testosterone (for men)
Estradiol and Estrogen (for women)
Strength training helps prevent the loss of muscular strength known to accompany aging.
When I say “strength training” I don’t mean heading to the gym and using stationary machines either.
Complete activation of mitochondria at a level that can impact gaining processes can only happen with total activation of multiple muscle groups.
By exercising multiple muscle groups simultaneously, you also burn more calories (which means you lose weight faster…if you want to lose weight).
One of the best ways to activate as many muscles as possible (in as little time as possible) is to incorporate a “HIIT” or “High-Intensity Interval Training” routine into your schedule.
HIIT training allows you to activate more muscles in less time—sometimes as little as 15 or 20 minutes.
Read: Benefits of Fitness Walking - 3 Ways to Build a Strong Body and Heart
HIIT: High-Intensity Interval Training
HIIT is a form of interval training, a cardiovascular exercise strategy alternating short periods of intense anaerobic exercise with less-intense recovery periods. Though there is no universal HIIT session duration, these intense workouts typically around 30 minutes, with times varying based on a participant's current fitness level.
High-Intensity Interval Training is a simple concept to implement with the Fitness Walking Exercise Program. Every 4-minutes, you will perform 40 seconds of a fitness exercise… that’s it!
In your 35-minute walk, you will perform 8 fitness exercise sets and end with a 3-minute cool-down.
You control the intensity of the 40-second set and as your fitness level increases, the intensity of the 40-second fitness set will naturally increase.
The Mind-Body Connection:
If you are not in shape right now, there is something you are not doing correctly. You may not have the correct information or you may not think getting in shape is possible for you.
You have an extraordinary mind. As the poet John Milton writes in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.”
The Fitness Walking Exercise Program focuses on your mindset.
One of the most interesting findings of the past few decades is that an increase in oxygen is always accompanied by an uptick in mental sharpness. Exercise acts directly on the molecular machinery of the brain itself. It increases neurons’ creation, survival, and resistance to damage and stress.
Exercise, whether it’s walking or doing bodyweight fitness exercises increase oxygen to the brain and reduces brain-bound free radicals
DEVELOPING A POSITIVE MINDSET IS AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT OF YOUR LIFE SUCCESS.
Why Affirmations Work
Affirmations are simply positive statements that describe a desired situation. “I am healthy, happy, and radiant!” is an example. It’s a positive statement that describes your desire to be a healthy, happy, and radiant person.
Positive affirmations help your internal dialog to create a new vision you have of yourself and your life.
Affirmations are repeated several times so the subconscious mind can spring into action. Repetition is the key to reinforcing the learning and embedding new thoughts into your mind.
Accomplished people from all walks of life use affirmations along with other powerful positive thinking techniques to help them achieve their goals. Your mind and its thoughts are a powerful force that, when used positively, can help you achieve whatever you set out to accomplish.
Your subconscious mind accepts as true whatever you say to yourself.
Whether you think you can do something or not, you are correct!
With affirmations, your potential is unlimited. Strong, affirmative statements, emotionalized and repeated with conviction, often bring about immediate personality changes.
The affirmations used in the Fitness Walking Exercise Program will keep you motivated throughout the 35-minute session. Just walk, listen, exercise… and FEEL GREAT.
Fitness Walking and Weight Loss
When losing weight, more physical activity by walking and doing fitness exercises increases the number of calories your body uses for energy. The burning of calories through physical activity, combined with reducing the number of calories you eat, creates a “calorie deficit” that results in weight loss.
While weight loss largely occurs because of decreased caloric intake, evidence shows the only way to maintain the weight loss is to be engaged in regular physical activity.
Why Purchase the Fitness Walking Exercise Program
The Fitness Walking Exercise session takes just 35-minutes per day to complete.
Walking is a low impact fitness exercise.
Walking is a natural movement that all but eliminates the risk of injury
You will complete a 40-second mini-fitness session every 4 minutes for a total of 32 minutes followed by a cool down!
The exercises are bodyweight movements so there is a near-zero risk of injury.
Upbeat music gets you pumped to walk
Affirmations throughout the session will have you in feeling positive, focused, and motivated.
Your improved mindset about getting in shape will have you looking forward to each session.
The four fitness movements target your whole body.
The Fitness Walking Exercise Program includes a 70-page eBook.
Topics covered:
What Exactly is Fitness Walking?
How to Get the Most Out of This Program
The Fitness Walking Program Audio Tracks
Stretching
More Benefits of Walking
The Benefits of Affirmations: Developing a Positive Mindset
How Physical Activity Improves Brain Power
Ways to Stay Motivated
Breathing
Supercharge Your Walking
Safety First!
Weather Considerations for Walking
29 Things to Do While Walking
Getting Out the Door
The Fitness Walking Exercise Program combines the rhythmic natural motion of walking with affirmations and fitness movements in a HIIT workout. The gentle nature of walking will keep you injury-free while the pushups, squats, lunges, and shoulder planks work your entire body for a supercharged workout. Combining fitness with affirmations will have you listening to this audio program again and again.
Try the Fitness Walking Exercise Program RISK-FREE to get into the best shape of your life and enjoy the 21 benefits of fitness walking.
Walk on,
Frank Ring
Author: Walking for Health and Fitness, and Fitness Walking and Bodyweight Exercises
Contact Frank at Frank@walkingforhealthandfitness.com
