Start With an Easy Pace to Warm-Up
First, you want to wake up your muscles and let them know you plan to be active for awhile. Walking at an easy warm-up pace for five to 10 minutes tells your muscles they can't just sit back and burn up the available sugars, they need to call on the fat reserves.This is why you should not start off at a high speed. When you do that, your cells don't get the signal that this is a long-term activity. So instead of pulling fat out of storage to burn as energy, they burn up sugars only.
Speed Up to a Determined Pace to Burn Fat
The speed to walk for optimal fat-burning is a "determined" pace.- At this rate, you should be breathing noticeably but able to carry on a conversation in full sentences.
- Heart rate target should be 60-70% of your maximum heart rate. Target Heart Rate Calculator
- How should it feel? It should feel as intense as when you are walking fast because you are 10 minutes late for an important appointment. That is how Marilyn L. Bach describes it in her book ""Shapewalking."
- Walk at this speed for 30 minutes at a time to ensure you are dipping into your stored fat. See the Beginners Walking Plan to build up to that duration.
Raising your Metabolism
Good work, you've tricked your body into dipping into your fat stores for energy. You are also building muscle and raising your basal metabolic rate so you are burning more calories all day long.But What If I Can't Walk That Much?
Start with the Beginners Walking Plan, it will get you started the right way to build up to being able to walk for 30 minutes at the fat-burning pace. It also tells when to seek medical advice and how to avoid injury. Any amount of activity over your present level will help you achieve your weight loss goals, so go slow if that is what is comfortable.Walking Faster and Faster
If you are already walking 20 miles total per week and want to get more results purely from walking, then you need to build speed as well as duration. You can use good arm motion and stride to speed up, as shown in our How to Walk Faster Tutorial. Or you can learn the Olympic racewalking technique to burn more calories per mile.How to Racewalk
Next Page: How Long and How Often to Walk to Lose Weight
Pace and Calorie Calculators
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