What are the weight-loss and/or cardiovascular benefits of Walking say, 2 hours a day?
I’ve started leaving for work early and taking a long route which means my walk to work takes two hours. But because I’m not running it doesn’t seem/feel like I am doing anything worthwhile for my heart and circulation. Nor for weight loss.
Any health expert dopers?
I’d say the benefits far outwiegh not doing anything! The important thing to remember is to be realistic in setting goals. You don’t need to feel like you ran a marathon in order to have a positive impact on your health. Walking for two hours straight is significant, so don’t let self-doubt creep in too quickly.
Questions:
Do you feel that you are raising your heart rate at all while walking? Are you walking home from work? The longer you can sustain a raised heart rate, the more cardio. impact you are going to acheive.
As far as weight loss is concerned, I am sure you are aware that your diet will play a large role in the amount of weight you will be able to lose. I have gone through times of very intense physical training in which I gained weight because of my diet. I have also done less exercise at other times, but loss greater amounts of weight, again by controling my diet. In other words, you could work out 3 hours/day in the gym with a trainer, and if you eat like a pig, you might not see any weight loss results at all.
Questions:
Are you watching what you eat? What restrictions are you placing on your diet?
Don’t quite know if that helps at all, but let me know.
IANAE, but a gym/fitness rat for a long time now.
Unless you are very out of shape and find it difficult to walk for 2 hours, the cardiovascular benefits are negligible. To improve your cardio health you need to elevate your heartrate to a 60 to 85 percent maximum for your age. To find out what those numbers are, simply subtract your age from 220 (giving you your max) and multiply that value by 60% and 85% to get your lower and upper limits. You’ll likely need to jog or run to get your heart rate into that range.
But walking is not without benefits. Something is better than noting at all and you will definately burn some calories by walking.
Wear good walking shoes to avoid shin splints and sore feet.
Out you go! 
It does help quite a lot acutally.
It is not noticable unless I am walking up a steep hill. The geography of Doulgas (capital IOM) means most of my walk to work is level or downhill. I tend to get lifts home so walking home is not as common as walking to work (but it does happen)
Today I took a small detour on my large detour. I walked down some steep steps to a small bay. Walking back up definately increased my heart rate noticeably, but I did not become out of breath. I feel confident that I can sustain quite a long period of increased heart-rate walking (uphill) without becoming out of breath.
I am watching what I eat up to a point. I have completely cut out non-diet drinks. And I have reduced the frequency of bad eating, and the quantity of total eating, but I’d say my diet is still far from perfect.
Walking is a pretty painless way to burn calories, in my opinion. On a kilometer per kilometer basis, it burns about the same calories as running…it just takes longer to do it. And I’ve never heard of anyone having to sideline themselves for a month from “walker’s knee”.
Actually, Cecil says running burns more calories than walking when compared kilometer to kilometer.
Still, walking more is better than walking less. But if you’re wanting to drop pounds, I recommend jogging with a backpack full of work clothes to change into once you get to work. Assuming you have a shower there you can use, of course.
A shower? At my work? HA! We’re lucky we sinks.
Anyway. I’ve never been a fan of running (except when playing footy, where the sheer fun of playing masked the lack of general will to run) But I was always a keen cyclist. And in my late teens/early twenties I had quite a vigorous cycling routine.
I have a bike, but no place to shelter it so it has fallen into disuse (rust etc…) But I plan to buy a new one and the means to cover it.
If you’re not doing anything else right now, then walking is a great place to start. Stick with it.
Exercise is a sucky way to lose weight. You need to burn 3500 calories to drop one pound; one hour of exercise burns 300-600 calories, max.
This is not to say exercise is bad – it’s good for keeping your cardiovascular stuff in shape – but don’t expect to lose weight significantly with exercise alone.
I lost about 30 pounds at one point, just by walking ~45 minutes a day and keeping my food intake reasonable. It took a long time, though.
I will have to disagree with this statement. Walking can have a very positive affect on your cardio. fitness level, as long as it is done at the right pace, and over a decent distance. Also, walking is much easier on the joints. Running can be a nightmare for some people, especially those trying to get back into shape after a long hiatus from exercise.
I am not saying Quicksilver is doing so, but I find it interesting that many people who consider themselves to be “in shape” often snub the benefits of “easy” exercises such as walking. As I said in my first post, you do not have to kill yourself to get in shape, or reap the benefits of any type of exercise.
Check here for some more information.
Please note that I left that smiley in there by accident! :smack:
I stand corrected by the Master. 
Still, doing a relatively mild exercise but something you enjoy and can stick with is way better than killing yourself doing something you hate.
And I wouldn’t downplay the weight loss benefits of regular walking. Two hours of walking is going to burn roughly 4 or 500 calories. That’s gonna add up after a while, particularly if you don’t increase your daily calorie load.
Walking can give you a good cardio workout, just pick up the pace a bit. A leasurely walking pace is three miles an hour, if you bump it up to between four and five mph you’d be going faster than some people jog but you wouldn’t be risking your knees. Hills are fun but is sounds like you don’t have that option where you are.
Cardiovascular benefits are very good, my resting heartrate is in the low fifties after six years of walking. Weight loss has been fair but I haven’t changed my diet at all. I lost fifty pounds and I stabilized at my new weight but my shape continues to change. My waist is thinner and my legs have become very muscular. I no longer float when I go swimming.
When I started it was all I could do to walk a mile, now I do several walks a week that break ten miles. A short walk now is five. There are a whole bunch of other benefits I didn’t expect when I started. I know my neighbors and my neighborhood now, I’ll stop to chat when I see people outside and some people will join me for walks. I hooked up with a walking group that is politically active in providing trails and safe routes for walkers so I’ve learned how my city government works. I have the Bureau of Environmental Services on speed dial and I’ve reported over a dozen spills of pollutants into the local streams. Walking has been very beneficial in my life.
Couldn’t you walk there, and jog home? Even if you can’t jog the whole way, maybe you could walk/jog (like one minute walk, one minute job, one minute walk, etc.). That way, you could shower at home.
Even if not, the walking will definitely help your health. While it’s not going to make you lose massive amounts of weight on its own, it will definitely make it easier. I am on a diet and all the exercise I can really do is walking, and I don’t walk that much, and even with a very reasonable (non-starvation, just cutting junk food) diet I lost over eight pounds the first month. Granted, I am very overweight, but still.
My mom and her friend walk 3 miles a day and it’s really helped her to lose some weight and keep it off, long term. They walk fast, though. I mean, they’re ladies in their 60’s adnd I sure couldn’t keep up with them. She goes to the gym wiht me now for strength training, but she lost the weight with diet and the walking.
Think about it this way, per your estimates:
300 X 7 days a week = 2100 calories burned
600 x 7 days a week = 4200 calories burned.
Avg 1 pound of calories burned per week x 52 weeks a year = 52 pounds a year in weight loss.
How fast do people gain weight? On avg, 3 to 10 pounds sound about right, I mean we don’t actually gain 50 pounds in a single year do we?
So you could lose 5 years worth of weight gain just walking every day.
Note: the above is only an example…
Yeah, and you exercise 5 hours per week, and lose about half a pound per week. It’s called healthy, sustainable weight loss.
What would you recommend, Atkin’s Diet?
That’s not too hard; an extra chocolate bar and a bag of potato chips once a day (+500 calories) would do it. 500 x 7 = 3500 calories x 52 weeks = +52 pounds gained in a year.
I’m on the Hacker’s Diet, myself – I’m running an 850-1000 calorie deficit a week, and have lost almost 20 pounds since mid-January. My only exercise is an hour of bowling once a week, which gives me four more hours a week to do other stuff. 
Again, I’m not knocking exercise as a general-purpose keep-yourself-healthy activity, but exercise alone is a sucky way to lose weight.
That formula is simplistic to the point of being useless. Your body is not a lab reaction giving identical results for all inputs. You adapt, if you eat more your body will use the food less efficiently. You will gain weight but at a decreasing rate over time.
If I use your formula for your own weight loss, 7 weeks at a 1000 calorie deficit per week I calculate a loss of 7000 calories or two pounds, not twenty. Something else must be going on there as well
Diets fail over 90 percent of the time because people can’t or won’t follow them forever. Dieting without exercise leads to muscle loss at a faster rate than fat loss but the regaining cycle afterwards puts on more fat than muscle. You end up in worse shape than if you never dieted in the first place.
Exercise alone may be a sucky way to lose weight but it’s great for keeping off the weight you do lose and it works for keeping and building muscle mass.