Walking Your Way To A Fit Life Style With A Pedometer App

While talking about the walking benefits, a couple of months ago a friend gave me the idea to download a pedometer app for my phone, to track how many steps I took. I did it just for kicks, and found a pedometer app that ran in the background and didn’t eat too much of my battery, so I just let it count and count without checking for a few days.

The first time I checked how much I walked I was surprised. I thought I’d taken fewer steps than that. And this first bit of motivation is what got everything started. Now I check the pedometer app every day, and find ways to sneak in a walk daily.

Here’s how a pedometer has helped me see some walking benefits, and how it could help you find your motivation to start working out.

How About Walking ?

Not A Workout?

My first thought was that walking wasn’t a real exercise until you started to break a sweat. And of course, if you’re getting technical about it, brisk walking is recommended if you want to shed a few pounds, but I never considered that commuting to work by foot (a mere 15 minute daily walk for me) could help so much.

I tried to calculate and to this date I managed to burn about 14000 calories. To me that’s a pretty big number if you think that walking is an activity that you can do while you talk on the phone.

One of the best walking benefits is the fact that you are actually working out without feeling like you’re making too much of an effort.

Pushing Yourself

With walking it’s a bit easier to keep pushing yourself, rather than, say, with lifting weights. If you walk 5000 steps today, and you need to do is set a goal for the next week for instance, of walking 6000 steps each day, and you’ll soon start feeling the walking benefits without feeling the dread of a heavy workout coming up. A pedometer can help, but remember there are phone apps that use GPS to figure out how much you’ve walked, if calculating the walking benefits through miles walked and calories burned is what works best for you.

Step It Up

If, like me, you live in a city with no hills, or any elevation at all, really, you get a bit bored sometimes, even if you know that the walking benefits are enormous.

Of course, if you live in a mountain area, you can step up your game by going hiking. Yes, you can take your pedometer with you, and trust me those 5000 steps on a mountain will make you feel as proud as 15000 steps on flat ground.

But if you live in a city by the sea, for instance, your best choice is to try to take the stairs as often as possible if you want to take the walking benefits to the next level. You can walk up the stairs slowly, then slowly walk back down, but overall you’ll still be getting a good workout.

Have you felt the walking benefits on your own body? Do you walk a lot? Let us know how this has improved your body in the comments below.