Walking is one of the most basic and most important things you can do for your fitness and your health. We have been doing it almost since birth, yet sometimes we forget that we can use this basic way to get around as a method of fitness as well.
Remember how everyone made a big deal of your first steps as a child? Walking was just about the most exciting thing you could do for a few years.
However, as you got older, you probably forgot just how exciting walking used to be for you. In fact, the percentage of adults who spent most of their day sitting increased from thirty six percent in the year 2000 to almost forty percent in the year 2005.
This percentage is not only staggering, it is depressing. Part of the reason may be your hectic, stressful life, with not a moment to spare for an actual workout.
Your environment plays a part too. Inactivity has been engineered into our lives, from escalators to remote controls, to riding lawn mowers, to robotic vacuum cleaners, to electric toothbrushes, to the disappearance of sidewalks and safe places to walk. It seems that every modern convenience only works to help us move less.
Research shows that all this lack of motion is bad for our health. Inactivity is the second leading preventable cause of death in the United States, second only to tobacco use.
Fewer than fifty percent of American adults do enough exercise to gain any health or fitness benefits from physical activity. Evidence suggests that this is the perfect place to begin your fitness routine.
To begin with, it helps to prevent type two diabetes. The Diabetes Prevention Program showed that walking just one hundred and fifty minutes per week and losing just seven percent of your body weight can reduce your risk of diabetes by fifty eight percent-not bad!
It also strengthens your heart, particularly if you are a male. In one study, mortality rates among retired men who walked less than one mile per day were nearly twice that among those who walked more than two miles per day-quite a staggering rate.
In another study, women who walked three hours or more per week reduced their risk of a heart attack or other coronary event by thirty five percent, compared with women who did not at all. In addition to this, it is good for your brain.
In a study on this form of fitness and cognitive function, researchers found that women who walked the equivalent of an easy pace at least one and a half hours per week, had significantly better cognitive function and less cognitive decline than women who walked less than forty minutes per week. If you have any form of mental illness or Alzheimer's disease in your family history, this is something you really may want to consider.
It is also good for your bones. Research shows that postmenopausal women who do this for approximately one mile each day, have higher whole-body bone density than women who walk shorter distances.
It is also effective in slowing the rate of bone loss from the legs, which is something you really may want to think about if you are aging. It even helps alleviate symptoms of depression.
Walking for thirty minutes, three to five times per week for twelve weeks reduced symptoms of depression as much as forty seven percent, according to one medical study. It even reduces the risk of breast and colon cancer.
Women who performed the equivalent of one hour and fifteen minutes to two and a half hours per week of brisk strolling had an eighteen percent decreased risk of breast cancer, compared with inactive women. Many studies have shown that exercise can prevent colon cancer, and even if an individual person develops colon cancer, the benefits of exercise appear to continue both by increasing quality of life, and reducing mortality.
Another study of sedentary females showed that short bouts of brisk exercise resulted in similar improvements in fitness, and were at least as effective in decreasing body fatness as long bouts. Research shows that it improves fitness and physical function and prevents physical disability in the elderly.
With all of these staggering benefits right in front of your face, why not begin right away? It is never too late to change your life.
Author Resource:-
Terry Daniels is an accomplished expert in health and fitness. He recommends the besttreadmill you can find in the market.
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