3 Tips to Advance Your Daily Walk

Since the Pandemic people are walking more regularly, taking in the local streets, parks and trails looking to enhance fitness, mental health, and a sense of their community. But walking the same routes can become a chore. Here’s 3 tips to help add variety and interest back into your daily stroll.

Resistance – walking with a weighted backpack builds strength and endurance and ups the calorie burn from a normal walk. Adding weight is a gradual process. Start with an empty pack and incrementally add weight as you become more used to it. This is a great way to prepare for a backpacking trip.

Go Nordic – Nordic Walking is an enhanced walking technique that involves using walking poles that encourage applying extra force with each step. The technique gives conditioning to your upper body and core as well as legs. From Nordic Walking you can see, on average, a 22% increase in calorie burning and will consume 23 percent more oxygen. For more information on Nordic walking visit https://nordicwalking.co.uk

Fartlek “Speedplay” – unlike interval training, the Fartlek approach doesn’t glue you to a structure, instead you can dictate the pace, the duration and the recovery of your effort depending on how you feel at that moment. You can simply increase your gait into a power walk and then back off until you feel recovered to go again. Be adaptable to the terrain and use features/landmarks such as lampposts as yardsticks.