Club Benefits
Walking workouts tick so many boxes for me: they're low-impact, free and help boost mindfulness before, during and after a long working day. Walking also strengthens your body, including your bones and muscles, and can lower your risk of chronic conditions like stroke, high blood pressure and blood sugar.
In fact, fart walking became a popular trend this year simply because it helps improve digestion and manage blood sugar levels if you go for a quick walk after you eat.
Below, I share a walking workout I use when I don't want to run, but I do want to feel as though I'm doing exercise. As a reminder, if you’re returning to exercise or you’re dealing with a specific injury, it’s always best to seek personalized advice from a qualified professional.
What is the workout?
To do this walking workout, you split 20 minutes into 30-second splits of different paces. The research tells us that pace and intensity can matter for improving health markers more than just distance alone, meaning the quality of your walk matters.
That's not to say every walk must be fast, but if you want to increase your heart rate and challenge your body, alternating paces could help you burn calories, boost your metabolism and get your system working a little harder.
You could use a stopwatch, but I recommend using your phone or one of the best fitness trackers to keep an eye on the timings. In terms of intensity, I like to rate out of 10 using RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion); it means going by what your body feels.
I would recommend doing this walk outdoors somewhere that allows you to add compound bodyweight exercises into the routine to help build strength in the body. You can skip this in favor of alternating walking paces only, but I highly recommend keeping them in for adding intensity and strength work that loads the body.
- Walk for 30 seconds at a 4/10 RPE (a conversational pace)
- Walk for 30 seconds at a push pace of 7-8/10 (similar to power walking)
- 30 seconds of push-ups (here's how to do a push-up)
- Walk for 30 seconds at push pace
- Walk for 30 seconds at 4/10 RPE
- 30 seconds of squats (here's how to do a squat)
- 30 seconds of walking lunges (here's how to do walking lunges)
Repeat for up to 20 minutes.
For all exercises, remember to engage your core, bracing your midsection as if you were about to be punched.
What are the benefits?
Walking is a great way to improve bone density and prevent muscle atrophy as you get older, which we naturally lose with age. The loading impact of walking stimulates the bone-building cells in the body, helping improve balance and stability.
Push-ups, squats and lunges are known as compound exercises, which means they strengthen and coordinate multiple joints and muscles together.
As I mentioned, switching up the pace and intensity of your workout compared to a standard walk at a steady pace will help temporarily boost your metabolism and kickstart calorie burn. That said, you'll need to focus on other forms of exercise, overall daily movement levels and diet to manage weight.
And remember, not every walk needs to be a workout, but it can certainly keep things more interesting and help you focus on what your body is doing, which is a form of mindfulness.
Check out our socials to see why we recommend hitting pause and slowing down your walks on the odd occasion.
Follow Tom's Guide fitness on Instagram for more workouts, routines, tips, and tricks.
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