Want to get more out of your walking workout? Experts say a simple tweak to your routine can help boost - or even double - the calories you burn during every walk. It’s already a great way to get some exercise, but some people wish it resulted in more than a relatively low calorie burn. According to Harvard Health, a 155-pound person burns just 175 calories during a 30-minute walk when walking at a pace of four miles an hour.
So to up those calories burned, Danielle Gray, a certified personal trainer and nutritionist, advises interval training. “Walk at a casual pace for a minute, then powerwalk as quickly and effectively as you can for 30 seconds,” she says, adding to keep those intervals up for the entire workout. She explains that interval training helps push your body outside its comfort zone to “extend caloric burn” even after you’re finished exercising.
And research backs her up, with one study finding that short bursts of high-intensity exercise can significantly increase calorie burn when it’s done with longer periods of lower-intensity exercise. But if interval training isn’t your thing, you can get the same results by adding some resistance. Gray says holding weights as you swing your arms on every step “can do wonders” and doing overhead presses or curls while you walk with weights helps strength train and stabilize your core at the same time. “When you use more calories to complete a task,” she explains, “you burn more calories.”
Source: Eat This, Not That
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