6 Benefits Of Walking To Improve Your Health

One of the main benefits of walking when it comes to your health is that it is a simple, cheap and the effective way of burning calories.  It’s also one of the least intensive forms of exercise around, it is easy to fit into your daily routine and can be enjoyed by all the family.

Walking is easy to fit into your day. Just doing simple things like by parking your car a little further from work or getting off public transport one stop early all make a difference. While most of the benefits of walking are physically health-related, there are some mental benefits of walking too. Here are 6 benefits of walking to improve your health.

6 Benefits Of Walking To Improve Your Health

1. Manage Your Weight

The benefits of walking as a form of exercise helps to burn extra calories. A 15-minute walk after lunch at steady pace of 3mph will burn approximately 60-70 calories depending on your weight. While this doesn’t sound like much, it amounts to 300 calories over a 5-day working week. Add to that some walking at the weekend and you can see how the calories burned over a week can really add up.

2. It Helps Your Circulatory System

Your heart rate increases when you’re walking and this moves more blood around your body. When more blood goes to your body’s cells it gets more good oxygen into your body and more unwanted carbon dioxide and waste out. A strong circulatory system helps to reduce your risk of heart disease and lower your blood pressure.

3. It Helps To Reduce Your Total Cholesterol Ratio

Another one of the physical benefits of walking is that it helps to raise your levels of HDL cholesterol. This is a good cholesterol removes harmful bad cholesterol, called LDL cholesterol, that can clog arteries and make you less flexible. Narrow and clogged arteries are bad news as they can cause a stroke.

4. It Improves Your Lungs

Your lungs have to work harder when you walk to get air in and out. In the process, your lungs will gain capacity and become more efficient. More capacity and better efficiency helps your lungs to get more oxygen from the air and into your blood, and remove waste carbon dioxide from your blood into the air.

5. It Can Help Your Mood

There are mental benefits of walking too.  A walk after lunch can help you to clear your mind, relieve the any stress from the morning and help you to better prepare yourself for the work you have to do in the afternoon.

6. Boost Your Brain Power

The benefits of walking also directly effect your brain. The brain functions better when your blood has flowed more throughout your body, you have more oxygen and less carbon dioxide in lungs and you’re less stressed. The positive effects carry over for hours after you are done walking.

WANT MORE EASY WAYS TO LOSE WEIGHT?

As you can see, there are many benefits of walking to improve your health and fitness. It’s simple, cheap and effective. The secret to losing weight easily is to have a weight loss nutrition program that includes a wide selection healthy foods and allows you to incorporate occasional treats.

Take advantage of apps like My Food Diary. This highly-acclaimed food database contains over 100,000 foods to improve your diet and the exercise log can calculate calories burned for over 700 activities to help you achieve your weight loss goal.