It is no secret that walking is incredible for both your mental and physical health, but if fat loss is your goal, then I am sure you are also thinking about the calorie burn you get as a result of walking.
Walking has numerous benefits. While running burns more calories than walking, walking is actually a much lower impact exercise, so your risk of injury decreases significantly. It also reduces your risk of high blood pressure, improves your cardiovascular health, does wonders for mental health and is a great way to start getting into exercise. An added bonus of walking is that, if you are already exercising quite a lot, it is a fantastic way to increase your overall daily calorie expenditure without adding a super high intensity workout into your day, which could fatigue your body, increase your risk of injury, spike your hunger levels and end up doing more harm than good.
When it comes to calculating how many calories you burn from walking, this depends on numerous factors, including your height, weight, age, how far you are walking, how fast you are walking and the terrain.
While the faster you walk will increase the number of calories you burn, your weight and the length of time you walk for actually have a more significant impact on the total number of calories burned.
It is common to use fitness trackers, such as fitness watches, to track your calories burned from walking. While these are an indication of calorie burn and tend to be super motivating to encourage you to get those steps in, they are not always accurate.
A very general baseline is that 30 minutes of walking burns between 100-300 calories; obviously this is a huge range, as it depends on so many factors.
If you are keen to increase the calorie burn or intensity of your walks, try:
- Adding a weighted vest or heavy backpack – your overall weight does have a significant impact on the calorie burn from walking. You could also add ankle weights.
- Add stairs or a gradient – if you are walking around your local area, find some steps and add these into your daily walks. This increases the demand on the body, upping the calorie burn. The same goes for a steeper gradient – this can also be achieved on a treadmill by increasing the incline.
- Set a baseline step count – if you want to increase your daily activity, aim to get 10,000 steps a day. If you lead a more active lifestyle, you could push this to 12,000 or even 15,000. These small daily changes will have a large impact long term on both your physical and mental health!
