Fitness Walking
The Best Exercise Program Anywhere Any time
Americans, on the whole, are fatter than just about any other group of
people in the world. They also have some of the highest rates
of Type-II Diabetes and heart problems in the world. Why are
we so fat? Weight gain is usually a combination of two
things: an unhealthy diet and a lack of exercise. Most
people, when they decide to try and lose weight, only tackle part of
the problem. They try dieting or taking pills or living off
of lemon juice and cayenne pepper for awhile, but usually it doesn't
work. Though a healthy diet is important to losing weight,
it's still only part of the equation. If you cut down your
calories but still sit on a couch or in an office every day, you're not
going to lose much weight. Interestingly enough, though many
people are happy to try dieting, there aren't many who only work at the
other side of the equation: exercising.
So why don't people exercise? Part of it is attached to our
mentality about exercising. Exercising brings up images of
sweaty, unhappy people lifting weights in a smelly gym, and it sounds
like a lot of work. However, exercising doesn't mean you're
going to have to pump iron for a few hours every day. In
fact, lots of things are considered exercising, from playing a pick-up
game of basketball to gardening to just taking a walk around the
block. Most studies have found that a half hour of exercise
every day is enough to keep you healthy, and that half hour doesn't
even have to be all at once. You can skip rope for ten
minutes in the morning, take a walk for ten minutes after lunch, and
take a walk around the block for ten minutes when you get home and
night and take care of all of your exercise for the day.
But wait a minute, you say, how can walking be good for you?
I walk every day!? The average American walks for only about 1/3 of a
mile every day. However, fitness walking is a great way to
lose weight, especially because it's so available. If you
want to go swimming you have to go to a pool, change clothes, swim,
change again, and go home or to work, but if you're taking part in
fitness walking all you have to do is walk out the door of your
office. Fitness walking is also an attractive exercise choice
because it's low-impact and virtually injury-free, and serves as a nice
warm up for running or jogging. Fitness walking is also easy
to incorporate into any schedule, since if you walk fifteen minutes to
work every morning and fifteen minutes back every evening you're
already taken care of your exercise for the day, which will help you
lose weight and stay healthy.
All in all, the secret to this exercise regime is: maintain or build up
the intensity of this exercise so that the effectiveness gained from
the sum whole is greater than that of all the parts when done
seperately.
Besides being a naturopathic physican, Dr. Kang-pang Chan is a personal
trainer certified by the International Sports Sciences Association
(ISSA) as well as a certified instructor in
Yiquan - an advanced form of holistic Chinese martial art that utilises
precise bodymind coordination as the real source of power.
For more information about health and fitness, please see here.
