By Fedor Villard-López
Miami-Dade Health
Diets, fasting, and herbal supplements are great ways to lose weight, but if you don’t pair them with exercise, your efforts won’t be as effective as you would expect.
A simple way of exercising is to walk, but do you know what is the right amount of walking each day to help you achieve your weight loss goals, and how frequently you should do it?
Researchers and doctors say the ideal session is 30 to 90 minutes most days of the week for weight loss. You can walk more on some days and less on others, but the total time for the week should be at least 150 minutes (2.5 hours).
For the exercise to be effective -and not just a “walk in the mall”-, you should walk fast enough that you are in the moderate-intensity exercise zone at 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate. You should be breathing harder than usual and can speak in full sentences, but you couldn’t sing.
Nowadays, there is a plenty of ways to measure your heart rate while you walk, from wearable devices to all kinds of apps, to ensure you are exercising at moderate intensity.
While you can break up your walking time into periods of 10 minutes or longer, you get an added benefit of burning fat when you walk at a brisk pace for longer than 30 minutes at a time after warming up.
For those who have already achieved their weight loss goals and are working on maintaining your weight, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends you should spend 60 to 90 minutes most days of the week in moderate-intensity physical activity while not eating more calories than you expend all day.
