Don’t forget the snow.
I’m reasonably fit and active (this time of year, I try to ice skate 3x a week, once the snow melts, I run 20-35 miles per week). Of course I consider walking exercise. It doesn’t matter to me whether you do it in the course of your normal daily activities or if you have to specially have to set aside time for it.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine. So many people are discouraged from a healthier exercise by the nagging feeling that any activity that isn’t actively a struggle is worthless and even shameful.
Yes, elevating your heart rate and keeping it sustained for at least 25 minutes is better for your cardio-vascular system. But just because lower intensity exercise is less effective doesn’t mean it has no effect at all, and the person who walks every single day no matter what is going to be in better cardiovascular health than the person who works out intensely every other January. These things are related: when people feel like exercise has to be really, really difficult to be worth doing, they dread it and commit to it with a feeling of initial enthusiasm that is quickly replaced with dread. Once you are at that point, any excuse–an 80 hour work week, a bad cold, a sick pet, a sad friend–is a reason to quit.
Furthermore, low-intensity exercise is just as effective (if not as efficient) at burning calories, and probably more effective at caloric restriction: longer exercise sessions mean less snack time, and someone who has gone all out for 20 minutes is more likely to feel “entitled” to the proverbial exercise muffin than someone who walked for an hour.
That is why somebody invented the walking poles.
I tend to agree with you…
I’m with MandaJo on this one - this attitude, while widely spread, is dangerously wrong. Dangerously for two opposite reasons:
it discourages people from modest activities
it encourages different people to overdo exercise, increasing the risk of strain, injury and so on.
People who believe in the “it must hurt” school are the ones likely to go jogging or do other exercise even when they have a cold, leading to severe, permanent damage to the heart. They are likely to jog so hard that they damage their joints, although experts say you should still be able to talk with a partner (if you are out of breath, you are jogging too fast, as most joggers are). And so on.
Walking is absolutely exercise. I remember when I was a runner, I thought walking was for lazy people. Then I got older and realized that I enjoyed walking a lot because, although I got my heart rate up, I felt like I could enjoy the scenery more.
Yes, walking is exercise. My understanding is that for some people, walking is a better exercise option than running because while it takes longer to get your heart rate up, it’s far less jarring on the knees.
I like to walk. It gets the blood flowing, but I’m not in pain by the end of it.
Simple test - take your pulse for 6 seconds and multiply by ten. Check it against this chart (Fox and Haskell formula). Are you hitting 60% or more of your maximum heart rate for your age? Then that’s good fitness/fat burning exercise.
It’s also a good exercise for endurance. Most people would have to train to be able to run for more than an hour; with walking, that’s not a problem. Walking injuries are much less common, and it’s an excellent ‘entry-level’ exercise. I’m all for it!
I walked everywhere when I was in college. No car, and I lived in a city with good public transport.
When I graduated, I moved to a city with bad public transport, and I bought a car. I promptly gained about 20 pounds. Most of the walking I did in college wasn’t “power walking” and didn’t elevate my heart rate a huge amount, but it clearly had an effect. Yes, walking is exercise.
I’ve lost over twenty pounds in the past four months by walking to work and counting calories. I sure hope it’s exercise.
I do all different kinds of exercise, some kinds very vigorous and sweat/ache inducing, and other not so much. Walking falls into the latter category, but I believe it is exercise nonetheless. Walking at a brisk pace raises your heart rate at least a little bit, loosens up the muscles and joints, and helps you to clear your head. It also burns calories. Along with more intense cardio and weight training, I incorporate at least three walks a week of about 3 miles into my exercise regimen, sometimes more walks or more miles, and I miss it when I can’t do it.
When I was a teenager I had to walk about 10 miles a week from one job to another, and I was surprised that by the end of that summer I’d lost 10 pounds without even trying. It must have been the walking.
I do all different kinds of exercise, some kinds very vigorous and sweat/ache inducing, and other not so much. Walking falls into the latter category, but I believe it is exercise nonetheless. Walking at a brisk pace raises your heart rate at least a little bit, loosens up the muscles and joints, and helps you to clear your head. It also burns calories. Along with more intense cardio and weight training, I incorporate at least three walks a week of about 3 miles into my exercise regimen, sometimes more walks or more miles, and I miss it when I can’t do it.
When I was a teenager I had to walk about 10 miles a week from one job to another, and I was surprised that by the end of that summer I’d lost 10 pounds without even trying. It must have been the walking.
Nitpick: I was taught in EMT training that even the most experienced of EMTs should take the pulse for at least 15 seconds, and the recommended period of time is 30 seconds. Taking a pulse for only 6 seconds leaves a large margin for error: not counting that fraction of a beat at the end can significantly alter the pulse rate you come up with.
From a strict point of view - it is exercise. HR goes up, gets blood moving, muscles get used. This is regardless of whether you are a couch potato, or a world class athlete.
I think the crux of the question is more person to person, though. For some, walking for 30 minutes is a challenge and thus can be considered moderate or vigorous exercise, but for others 30 minutes is barely a warm up, and is considered extremely light exercise.
IMO, if someone says it is not exercise, their full thought is more akin to ‘yes, in a strict sense, it is exercise, but when I do it, the benefit realized is so miniscule that I’d be better off spending the time doing something more vigorous.’ At least, thats the fully developed thought I have when discussing walking as an exercise.
Regarding HR… The link previously provided is a generic starting point, but it uses the HRmax = 220-age formula, which makes some very significant assumptions that can dramatically alter the outcome. Anyone who has done HR based training will tell you that it doesn’t take long into a training regiment to find that that formula needs tweaking.
It is also worth noting that, on a per mile basis, jogging and walking burn about the same amount of calories (running, which would be more strenuous, is different) - about 125-150 calories per mile. It is just that for burning calories, running is mroe efficient from a time standpoint. However, as others have pointed out, walking sees lower injury rates.
So it all depends on the person, their situation and their end-goal.
Walking is best used as a long term endurance exercise. This is an extreme, and I don’t recommend anybody to do this, ever, but in Japan there’s a monk trial in some Buddhist sects in which the monk walks 70km (for reference, a marathon is 40km give or take) every day, with only a 2 hour break (for food, bathroom, whatever), and 17 hour days otherwise (I assume the missing 5 hours are sleep) continuously for 3 or 4 months. This is not easy, reportedly marathon runners who have tried to train by accompanying these monks generally give up with an upper bound of a week.
However, this is pretty much the archetypal extremal case, most walking won’t get to this level; however, if you have a week off, travelling long distances on foot would certainly be very good exercise, even if compared to running and other higher intensity activities.
Either way, I’d consider it light exercise, and an excellent starting point even without extremes.
Wait. What is this about?
Yes, the conventional wisdom amongst runners is, “If your symptoms are from the neck up, you can still run.” I.e., if you have a cold but it’s all head congestion, go ahead and run. If you’re having shortness of breath, lung stuff, etc., maybe take it easy a few days. I have certainly never heard that running with a cold can give you permanent heart damage. 
I only consider it exercise when it’s above and beyond what one needs to walk in order to accomplish their daily lives…unless one is suddenly adding a lot of walking to their daily activity, walking roughly the same amount as they grocery shop or pick up copies from the printer isn’t going to make them fitter. It probably helps maintain weight, however.
So, when I calculate how much “exercise” I get during the week, the normal paced walking I do just to move about doesn’t get added in, but the 1/2 hour a day I walk (at a rate of 4.5-5mph) instead of sitting around the break room does, and if I spend the whole damn day walking like when I go to the fair or wander Boston by foot that does too.
It’s low-intensity exercise that’s gentler on the joints than running or even jogging and doesn’t bring with it the myriad problems occasioned by swimming (which can be even lower-intensity, come to that). It’s not going to put you in the running for Iron Man all by itself, but, well, a twenty-mile hike over rough terrain can have challenges all its own.
(Especially if there’s ice. Damn, I hate ice.)
Yeah, I’ve never heard it either. I can’t see why running with a cold would possibly give you “severe, permanent heart damage.” The worst that’s happened to me running with a cold is that I feel fatigued more quickly, and run thirty seconds to a minute per mile slower than my usual pace. I certainly hope I haven’t caused any permanent heart damage because of this.