A common, very common sight along the streets and roads are small groups of people usually women, but occasionally men walking along in the latest sports footwear and clutching a water bottle. Similarly it is very common to see people on walking machines in gyms up and down the country, plodding along gazing up at the television screens in the belief that they will lose masses of weight. So is walking an effective form of weight losing exercise or a complete waste of time?
Walking consumes calories and therefore weight loss must follow. Well that's the theory, now here's the problem. Walking doesn't really use up that many calories and any weight lost is almost certainly made up again very quickly. Theoretically if you walked for hours and hours and then some more, each and every day you may lose weight, but who has got the time to do that?
Well that's the bad news. The good news is that there are other exercises that you can do that will positively boost your weight loss efforts for a number of reasons. Science has now taught us that more important than the actual calories used during exercise, are the calories used post exercise, consumed as your body recovers. Consequently you can be burning calories not only during the exercise itself, but also after the exercise has finished sometimes up to twenty four hours later. The idea should be therefore to pick exercises that don't take long to do, but have a large overall calorie burn.
So is walking a waste of time? If you can do it easily without getting out of breath, then yes it probably is. If you are very heavy or very out of condition then there are ways that you can use walking to boost your weight loss, but more importantly walking should be used to make you slightly fitter so that you can move onto more efficient weight loss exercises.
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