While there’s no single way to lose weight that works for everyone, general guidelines can help to some extent. There are weight loss exercises, diets, and one method that experts always recommend as the easiest: walking. Now, specialists explain how to do it more effectively.
The news. Experts recommend walking to stay healthy, control weight, and burn calories. But if you’ve spent much of your life walking from home to your destination without stopping, here’s what you need to know: You’re doing it wrong if your goal is to burn calories.
A team of researchers from the University of Milan, led by researcher Francesco Luciano, conducted a series of experiments and came to a surprising conclusion: Contrary to popular belief, taking breaks during walking is more effective for burning calories than walking non-stop.
The team recently published their study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Going deeper. The researchers explained that they began the study after noticing that many estimates of the energy required to walk relied on data from individuals exercising in a steady metabolic state. This state occurs when the heart rate is constant and the body’s energy production and consumption are balanced, similar to a car at cruising speed.
To investigate the energy requirements of different walking speeds, the researchers recruited 10 healthy volunteers and monitored them as they exercised on an elliptical machine and a treadmill. The exercises covered three speeds, with sessions lasting from 10 seconds to four minutes.
The results. The goal was to measure the oxygen and energy requirements of short walks compared to longer ones. What did the researchers find? Walking or climbing stairs in 10- to 30-second bursts required 20% to 60% more oxygen, an indicator of energy expenditure, than covering the same distance continuously. This is primarily because walking becomes more efficient after several minutes of movement.
This makes perfect sense to Luciano. As reported by The Guardian, he explains that shorter walking periods require more energy and oxygen to cover the same distance: “It’s like having a car that consumes more fuel during the first few kilometers than it does afterward.”
Energy records. During each exercise session, the researchers recorded how much oxygen each participant used and calculated the metabolic demands for the different walks. They found that the participants required more energy at the beginning of each walk to initiate movement and warm up the body, compared to later in the exercise when the body was already in motion and working more efficiently.
Luciano says the key is what happens at the beginning of the walk: “When we start walking, we may incur some fixed costs at the beginning of the bout. In analogy, driving a car needs some fuel to start the engine or get the car out of the garage. We found that when starting from rest, a significant amount of oxygen is consumed just to start walking. We incur this cost regardless of whether we then walk for 10 or 30 seconds, so it proportionally weighs more for shorter rather than longer bouts,” he told The Guardian.
There’s more. Measurements of participants on elliptical machines and treadmills also revealed that in the early stages of walking, people are less efficient at converting oxygen and energy into effective movement. This efficiency improves as they settle into a rhythm once they’re “warmed up.”
The research highlights the health benefits of short walks and taking the stairs, especially for sedentary individuals. It may also explain the fitness improvements linked to so-called “exercise snacks.”
The perfect walk. The study also comes full circle to what might be called the “perfect” walk in terms of calorie burn. The key to walking as exercise is consistency, with 150 minutes a week, or two and a half hours, being the minimum recommended.
The study emphasizes that intensity isn’t about how quickly you walk from point A to point B, but rather the opposite: walking the same distance in short bursts with intermittent stops.
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