Myth Exposed! Walking is the best form of Exercise

Wherever you’re from, I’m sure that you know that walking is the most advisable form of exercise by doctors and health officials to those who have a sedentary lifestyle . Why? It is free and easy to do. You don’t need equipments to start working out. Too bad, that it is not that effective.

As reported in the June 2009 edition of The Physician and Sports Medicine, walking is not enough to challenge the body to the point where it can do wonders to the body.

Our bodies must be challenged. If you workout in gyms, you will find that your body adapt to the stress level you apply to them. You can notice some progress when the weight that used to give you hard time lifting is not as it was before after a few weeks of doing it. As the body gets stronger, we need to apply more pressure so that our body keeps on improving.

Walking is truly one of the best ways to have a good workout, but as our body progressed, we need to resort to strength training to keep challenging our body. Some researcher believe that people who only walk as their main exercise losses lose 4 to 6 pounds of lean muscle mass. That’s not good for anyone!!

With less muscle, the body is not that strong. Meaning, that life is harder than it needs to be. Most old people don’t have much strength since they do strength training anymore as they used to when they were younger.

Regular walkers also suffer a reduction in their resting metabolism of 2 to 3 % each decade.

The loss of lean muscle and the metabolic slowdown in walkers are similar to those found in completely sedentary individuals. This means that walking can’t provide the physical challenge that an individual needed.

We need to strengthen our body now so that when we are older, we are still stronger and not weaklings like other people who are as old as we are. Like I already mentioned before, lifting weight helps the body to be in better health and stronger. More muscle also means that the aging process becomes slower.

I’m not pointing out that walking doesn’t do wonders for some people! All, I’ implying is that it is not enough. We should include some strength training in our workout. I believe that walking should only be a great activity and not considered as a means for exercising.