#WalkThisMay: The Benefits Of Interval Walking
Walking to lose weight is effective, convenient and great for your body. But if you want to slim down faster, or just boost your overall health levels, interval walking could be the answer. An interval walking program can boost your calorie and fat burning potential, as well as strengthen muscles – including your heart – without putting too much stress or strain on your body.
Belle spoke to Dean Hodgkin, a personal trainer and head of programming at fitness and wellness community app TRUCONNECT by TV.FIT. He told us why we should all consider turning our daily walk into an interval workout:
Why does interval training work?
Interval training enables you to perform a greater volume of exercise within each session, and so your results will improve in a shorter space of time. For example, if I asked someone to sprint non-stop for 3mins, it might be considered impossible for most of us. However, you will see the same results if you break it down into six 30 second sprints. It is the same amount of work but in an accessible, bitesize format.
How does interval training work?
Whilst it is widely known that exercise results in elevated serotonin levels, leading to the feel-good factor, it’s worth noting that interval training is one of the most efficient and effective routes to stimulating this natural high. The appeal for most people, however, is its power to impact weight loss, achieved by expending more calories during the session coupled with an increased ‘afterburn’ whereby your body continues to burn calories afterwards as it recovers from the effort. Finally, interval training can positively impact brain function due to changes in cerebral oxygenation as a result of increased blood flow.
How can introducing interval training into a daily walk improve our overall health & wellbeing?
By raising levels of dopamine and norapeniphrine, interval training can reduce feelings of anxiety and depression. Also, studies have shown it can lead to enhanced performance in the areas of memory, planning, decision-making and emotional control so it could actually help you to make better choices about your food intake, work tasks and even relationships.
Dean has applied these principles to create an innovative new interval training series on the TRUCONNECT by TV.FIT app, Sweatcoin Walk, and below are some workouts he shared with us to give you a taste as to how you can up your walking game:
A few more specific walking workout examples looking at how to bring interval training into your daily walk.
Guidelines
Break your walking speeds into three different levels as such:
Level 1: Walk with speed at moderate effort level, say 5 out of 10.
Level 2: Ramp up the intensity to around 7 out of 10.
Level 3: Walk at top speed.
Workout One (24mins)
Level 1 – 2mins, Level 2 – 2mins
repeat the 2 sections 5 more times
Workout Two (18mins)
Level 1 – 3mins, Level 2 – 2mins, Level 3 – 1min
repeat the 3 sections 2 more times
Workout Three (20mins)
Level 1 – 5mins,
Level 2 – 1min, Level 3 – 1min – repeat just these 2 elements 4 more times
Level 1 – 5mins
Workout Four
This workout doesn’t require set time periods and instead you can use markers such as the next tree or lamppost as your distance for top speed walking. Alternatively, if you are listening to music, I would walk at level two for the verse and then hit top speed for the duration of the chorus. There are no hard and fast rules on the time and distance, as long as you keep pushing yourself to a few brief level three ‘sprints’, you will be doing interval training.
