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To walk for the sake of heart health? Does walking deserve attention as a tool to improve your health and restore the body? Or does he deserve it? Just below we have listed all the benefits of walking for heart health, reducing the risk of heart attack and stroke. Read more about men’s health here ahealthyman
Since the 1970s, aerobic exercise has prevailed in OFP to improve or maintain our health. The slogan of the coaches of those times was: “No pain, no result” (no pain no gain). It was believed that the benefits of aerobic exercise depend on the volume and intensity, it is important to increase the heart rate by 70-85% of its maximum level, while maintaining the load continuously for 20-60 minutes, at least 3 times a week.
Aerobics classes are really the best way to show good results on the treadmill and a great way to improve physical abilities in sports. And it’s good for your health. But intensive and hard training is quite traumatic.
Running with a certain level of caution and preparation is really a great help for fitness and health, but it’s not the only way. Perhaps due to the fact that everyone is looking at sweat-soaked runners, they have a stereotype that it is such intense exercises that will bring their body into shape and improve their health. In fact, moderate intensity exercises are great for improving and supporting your health. The benefits for your body from such exercises as walking are quite large.
Noticeable results during physical activity depend on three elements: intensity, duration and frequency of exercise.
Since walking is less intense than running, you need to walk more and more often so that the body gets the same benefits as running. As a rough guide, the current American Association of Cardiovascular Diseases encourages able-bodied adults to do moderate-intensity exercise (for example, walking) 30 minutes a day, five days a week, or alternatively run 20 minutes 3 times a week. At first glance, running requires less time resources and the benefits are much higher, but if you additionally take into account the warm-up, hitch and necessary changing clothes with taking a shower, etc., then the differences in time spent between running and walking are significantly narrowed.
Hundreds of medical studies show that regular exercise benefits our health and that’s a good thing. But many of these studies combine different forms of exercise to investigate how the total amount of physical activity affects health. These are important studies, but it doesn’t necessarily prove that hiking itself is beneficial.
The report, which included the results of multiple studies, found that walking reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease by 31%, reduces the risk of death by 32%. These benefits were equally stable in men and women. The subjects walked about 9 km per week at a speed of about 3.2 km/h.
The benefits of walking to combat cardiovascular disease are biologically plausible, as are other forms of regular moderate exercise for your muscles. Leisurely walks reduce the risk factors for heart disease cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, vascular stiffness, inflammation and mental stress.
And if protection from cardiovascular diseases and lower mortality are insufficient arguments to motivate the constant practice of hiking, then we can also add that walking helps protect against dementia, obesity, diabetes, depression, colon cancer and even erectile dysfunction.
Walking is not just a slow walk, the difference between walking and running is that at any speed those who walk always have one foot on the ground, and runners are in the air for some part of the time and as the pace of running increases, the time of hanging in the air increases, which can reach 45% of the total running time.
What rises, sooner or later falls down. That’s why running is a very heavy load on the spine and joints. Every time runners land on a hard surface, they put a serious strain on the spine. For 1.5 km, the athlete must take on about 100 tons of impact force. From the point of view of hiking, the load is much lower.
Make walking a part of your daily life, let it benefit you, go to work or to the store on foot. If it’s too far, try to get out 1-2 stops before your destination and walk a little. Instead of looking for the nearest parking lot, just take a little more time and take a walk. Go for a walk at lunch instead of spending all your time in the dining room.
Walking has a great advantage, you can do it without any preparation at any time when there is an opportunity. Just start walking and bring benefits to your body. And if the weather outside is not conducive to walking, you can still walk in shopping malls, subway crossings, etc., etc.
Walking around the city is excellent for health. And if you walk up the stairs, it’s doubly useful. Many athletes use a ladder and walking up and down it as an excellent cardio exercise. Some doctors use a ladder, forcing the patient to climb it to understand the state of his cardiovascular system. As for housewives, the constant hassle in two- or three-story houses is one of the reasons why American women outlive their husbands by an average of 5 years.
What’s special about walking up the stairs? Researchers from Canada answered this question by testing 17 healthy male volunteers with an average age of 64 when they walked, lifted heavy weights or climbed stairs. Stair climbing had the best indicators in the field of positive effects on the body.
Start with small amounts of load in this fascinating lesson 1-2 flights of stairs, gradually increase walking up the stairs as an excellent exercise that will help your cardiovascular system. Gradually add more flights of stairs to your program. Use the elevator if you are very tired. Don’t forget to use the railing (especially when descending), and do not use the ladder after you have eaten a hearty meal or if you feel unwell.
Even at a slow pace, you burn calories 2-3 times faster going up the stairs than going up the elevator quickly. The Harvard Alumni Study found that men who walked at least eight flights of stairs a day on average had a 33% lower mortality rate than men who spent time in a sitting position. This indicator is even better than that of men, whose mortality is 22% lower, although they walked at least 2 km a day.
Walking is moving from point A to point B. A study of 12,000 American adults found that people who live in cities have a lower rate of overweight and obesity than people who live in the suburbs. For example, in Atlanta, 45% of men living in the suburbs were overweight and 23% were obese. Among the residents of the city, only 37% were overweight and 13% were obese.
Explanation: driving versus walking. To stay healthy, you need to walk for 30-45 minutes almost every day. Do this one-time or in parts for 5-10 minutes several times. Aim for a fast pace of 5-6 km / h, but remember that you will also get a lot of benefits from walking at a leisurely pace.
If you want to set yourself some goals, then start with 3-6 kilometers per day. On average, about 10 city blocks can be considered one kilometer. Or you can use modern technologies and take, for example, a pedometer that will send you notifications about how much you have passed, and collect all this electronically. Such devices of a good class cost around $ 40. But there is always a margin of error, even for the best and most expensive models, but in any case, the pedometer will motivate you and tell you about your successes.
Here is another small example of measurements -on the knee- that will help you navigate the indicators: if you have an average step length, take 2000 steps as 1.5 km, then determine your intensity level 80 steps per minute slow pace, 100 steps per minute moderate pace, 120 steps per minute fast pace. Even without counting, you can achieve high results just by reminding yourself to walk fast. The researchers gave this calculation option to a group of 84 overweight volunteers who spend a lot of time in a sitting position, all of them without athletic experience. The subjects reached a heart rate of 58-70% of the maximum range.
The meta-analysis of 18 studies on walking did not address the question that most studies of exercise and health were silent about: does exercise itself protect our health, or does genetic predisposition take its toll? But another important European study sheds light on this question.
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