Find your feet and walk your way to fitness
Picture the scene, it’s 7:30 and you’ve hit snooze on your alarm… again. It’s been a week since your last workout and you’re feeling pretty guilty, so you lug your gym bag along with you on the morning commute. You’re That Person on the train who takes up that tiny bit too much room, causing an onslaught of tuts and mutters, in a way that only passive aggressive Londoners know how to do. By the time you finish work, you’re staring at the gym bag shoved under your desk, knowing that you won’t be home for another hour, wondering whether you can put it off another week.
Sound familiar? Yeah, us too.
We’re busy people, and we’re only adding more onto our schedule. So it’s no surprise that the last thing we want to do at the end of the day is throw ourselves, getting sweaty in a room full of strangers.
What if we told you that walking just 30 minutes a day could dramatically improve your health? We kid you not. There’s no catch to this.
No time? No problem. The best thing in our (admittedly, lazy) opinion is how little effort walking takes! Integrating it into your daily routine, whether it means leaving 15 minutes earlier so you can skip the bus, or grabbing a takeaway cup rather than sitting in a coffee shop with friends, couldn’t be easier.
But to make it even easier for you to work it into your life, fitness vlogger Lucy Wyndham-Read has teamed up with Nelsons® arnicare® Cooling Gel to put together some top tips to make the most of your walking workout.
Know Your Pace
If you’re looking to burn calories, then setting the pace can be the difference between a light stroll and a power walk. A window-shop saunter can burn off approximately 230 calories in an hour, whereas a fast-paced, out of breath power walk can burn off up to 560 calories in an hour. So it’s easy to start off slow and build up, depending on how much you want to work!
Fashion Tech
As if you needed an excuse to get your hands on a Fitbit?! Now you have a legit reason; these handy pieces of wearable tech mean that your walking workout can be your new challenge. 10,000 steps to 5 miles? Challenge accepted.
Multi-tasking to the Max
Ever wonder where you’ll get the time to learn a new language? Or read that new book that’s gathering dust on your shelf? Take advantage of your 30 minutes a day with a podcast or audiobook that, if you’re a real fitnessphobe, will take your mind off the activity. If the thought of exercise doesn’t give you goosebumps then your audio accompaniment will just be a great addition. Who says you can’t have it all?!
Taking the Next Step
If you realise that actually, walking is really quite nice, then you might consider taking it to the next level. Hill walking is incredible for toning up and giving you a great shape, so start slow with some smaller slopes and work your way up. It’s also a great excuse to get away for the weekend to escape the city bustle. Climb mountains during the day and reward yourself with wine in the evening, how does that sound?
With celebrity trainers fitting into the stars’ workout schedules, walking is now less mid-life crises and hiking poles, more L.A hills and booty-sculpting. Lucy has made a video of her top tips here, so you can see how a fitness expert does it!
Now where did we put our trainers…?
