Exercising is important for two main reasons --- improving your fitness and your health. You can be fit and unhealthy and vice versa. Walking helps you improve your fitness and health, if you walk enough. Walking one mile a day isn't nearly enough to improve your fitness, according to the American College of Sports Medicine's guidelines. Walking a mile a day is enough to reduce your risk of bad health, but you can reduce your risk significantly more by walking more.
Fitness Guidelines
Improving your fitness requires aerobic, strength and flexibility exercises, according to the American College of Sports Medicine. Walking is an aerobic exercise, but walking one mile daily isn't even enough exercise to meet the ACSM's weekly minimum recommendation for aerobic exercise. The ACSM reports that you should do about 40 minutes of aerobic exercises such as bicycling and swimming about four days weekly. Your heart rate while exercising should be 55 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate, which is 220 beats each minute minus your age. You need to walk at least 3 mph for your heart rate to be 55 percent of your MHR, according to "The Complete Guide to Walking." Walking a mile daily at 3 mph, or walking 20 minutes daily and 140 minutes weekly, is close to the ACSM's recommended minimum aerobic exercise, but the ACSM reports that you should also do about 10 repetitions of 10 different strength training exercises two or three days weekly and should stretch each muscle group about 10 times weekly.
Walking Guidelines
Exercise expert Dr. Kenneth Cooper ranks walking as one of the best aerobic exercises along with bicycling, cross-country skiing, running and swimming. However, he recommends that people choosing walking as their aerobic exercise walk more than one mile per day. People who are 30 to 50 years old should walk three miles daily four times per week or 12 miles per week and should walk faster than 4 mph to become adequately fit, wrote Cooper. Older people need to start out very slowly, walking only one mile daily during the first week of their exercise program, but should be walking 12 miles weekly by the 12th week.
Health Benefits
Walking "may well be the perfect exercise," according to the college textbook "An Invitation to Health." You can begin to lower your risk of heart disease when you walk only one hour per week, which is less than half a mile a day if you're walking 3 mph, wrote author Dianne Hales. However, you can reduce your heart disease risk by 30 to 40 percent if you walk only two miles daily, according to "The Complete Guide to Walking" author Mark Fenton.
Fitness-Health Connection
When walking improves your fitness, you will live longer, according to "Dr. Dean Ornish's Program For Reversing Heart Disease." Ornish researched the fitness level of about 13,000 people and concluded that people who walked 30 minutes daily, which is 1.5 miles daily if you're walking 3 mph, are half as likely as unfit, sedentary people to die prematurely during the next eight years.
References
- "An Invitation to Health"; Dianne Hales; 2010
- American College of Sports Medicine: The Recommended Quantity and Quality of Exercise
- "Start Strong, Finish Strong"; Kenneth H. Cooper, Tyler C. Cooper, William Proctor; 2007
- "The Complete Guide To Walking"; Mark Fenton; 2008
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