Walking
Now it is common practise for fitness coaches to prescribe step targets to work synergistically with dietary intervention to lose fat.
Which is simple enough to understand given walking burns calories – which is one side of the “we need to burn more calories than we eat” to lose fat.
Great but what makes walking so great?
Well let’s first cover what walking doesn’t do
Walking alone will not
1. Put you in a calorie deficit
2. Guarantee you will lose fat
3. Be the most efficient way to lose fat
However walking and particularly counting steps allows you to clearly quantify the energy output in a particular cardiovascular medium which has very little cost to fatigue unlike traditional cardio exercise like running, crosstrainer, cycling and so forth.
Secondly as your Fatloss efforts continues for weeks and months – your body does a good job of adapting to the existent calorie deficit and therefore halting your fat loss progress. And rather than dropping your calories further which can cause a myriad of problems from low compliance, less energy, increased risk of injury increasing your steps will still allow you to increase calorie output without as many negative consequences as constantly dropping your calories.
Lastly, as walking tends to be done outside its helps us a health coaches indirectly help our clients receive more Vitamin D with Sun exposure. Vitamin D is now defined a global public health issue with multiple health repercussions. Specifically for Fatloss, a lack of sunlight tends to disrupt sleep in evening which is vital for fatloss. Secondly numerous studies have linked lower amounts of Vitamin D to weight gain.