Quite a while ago we explained a universal concept about weight loss: there is no single premise that works the same for everyone. What there is are general guidelines that, to a greater or lesser extent, can help us reduce the scale. From then until now we have learned a lot about exercises to lose weight, the diets to followor the most basic: why the hell I can’t stop gaining kilos. A method that experts always recommend is, a priori, the easiest to do: walk.
and now we know what is the best way to do it.
The advertisement. We knew that walking is a recommended exercise to keep us healthy and even help us control weight and lose weight. Now, if you’ve been leaving home for half your life and trying to get to destination
A team of researchers from the University of Milan led by Francesco Luciano carried out a series of experiments reaching the same conclusion: contrary to what is usually thought, if you want to burn calories by walking, it is more effective to make stops to rest You have to do it consistently from start to finish. The work is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The intrastory. As and as they have explainedbegan the study after observing that many estimates of the energy needed to walk were based on data from people exercising in a stable metabolic state, that is, when the heart rate is constant and the body’s energy production and consumption are balanced, such as the state of a car traveling at cruising speed.
Thus, and to learn more about the energy needs for different walks, the researchers recruited 10 healthy volunteers who were monitored while they exercised on a stair climbing machine and a treadmill. The exercises covered three different speeds with sessions lasting from ten seconds to four minutes.
The results. The idea, therefore, was to measure the oxygen and energy demands of short walks compared to longer walks. What did they find? Than walking or climbing stairs in periods of 10 to 30 seconds required 20 to 60% more oxygenan indicator of energy consumption, than covering the same distance in a continuous session, largely because walking is more efficient after several minutes in motion.
For Lucianomakes perfect sense if we think that when we walk for shorter periods, we use more energy and consume more oxygen to cover the same distance, “it’s like having a car that consumes more fuel during the first few kilometers than later.”
Energy records. They said in their work that for each exercise session they recorded how much oxygen each person consumed and calculated the metabolic demands for the different walks. They discovered that more energy was needed at the beginning of each walkto get going and warm up the body, than later in the exercise, when the body was already moving and working more efficiently.
According to Lucianothe key is what we do at the beginning of that walk, “when we start walking, we may incur some fixed costs at the beginning of the session. By analogy, driving a car requires some fuel to start the engine or get the car out of the garage. We found that, when starting to walk from rest, a significant amount of oxygen is consumed just to start walking. We incur this cost regardless of whether we walk for 10 or 30 seconds, so, proportionally, it weighs more in the shorter sections than in the longer ones.”
And more. Apparently, measurements of participants on the exercise machines also revealed that, in the early stages of a walk, people are less efficient at converting oxygen and energy in an effective movement, a situation that improves as they gain rhythm, when we have already “warmed up.”
A work that highlights the health benefits of short walks and jumping up stairs, particularly for people who are largely sedentaryand that can also explain the improvements in physical condition that occur with so-called “exercise snacks.”
The perfect hike. The study also closed the circle on what we could call the “perfect” walk in “caloric” terms. We already knew that the key to walking as an exercise was in consistency, and that about 150 minutes a weekor two and a half hours, are the minimum recommended average.
Now we must add that the intensity that is always claimed does not refer so much to how long it takes us to get from A to B, but rather the opposite, walk in short periods and with stops of the same distance.
Image | Diana Robinson, PickPick
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