Researchers discovered that walking faster has a number of health benefits – including adding up to 20 years on to your life expectancy.
Compared to normal walking, even if your walk at a fairly fast pace, brisk walking increases the intensity of your workout. Although brisk walking is not as strict as race walking, it gets your heart beating faster and your lungs berthing deeper.
Consequently, brisk walking has also been shown to have similar health benefits as running. You burn as many calories over the same distance, but the added bonus of speed walking is you don’t pick up joint injuries associated with running.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends walking 3-4 mph – which is equivalent to 20 minutes per mile or 15 minutes a mile. If you really want to improve your fitness and shed those extra pounds, throw some hills into your walk as well.
If you want to start a brisk walking program to improve your health, lose weight and feel great, start ramping up your walking speed. In this article, we’re going to go over some useful tips that will help you to increase your walking speed.
Getting Started
Before you can improve your walking speed, you need to know what speed you’re currently walking at. If you don’t have a speedometer to test your top speed or a distance tracker, use the sweatcoin app to count the number of steps you make and run it against a clock.
One mile equals 2100 steps.
Take Short Strides
Shorter strides mean your legs move faster. This means you will burn more calories because your engaging your body in more movement – but it also provides your legs with more power and enables you to pick up speed. Contrary to popular belief, shorter steps enable you to increase walking speed more than long strides.
Keep your back straight
Maintaining an upright stance is important for speed walking so avoid leaning slightly backwards or forwards. Your shoulders should be parallel with your hips. Also, relax your neck muscles, keep your eyes forward and engage your abs.
Use your toes to push off
Pushing off from the toes of your back foot gives you more power and keeps the forward momentum at a high level. This technique is important for maintaining peak performance.
Bend your arms to 85-90 degrees
How you use your arms plays a key role in the speed you walk – but maybe not in the way your think. Although you can be forgiven for thinking that pumping your arms helps to increase your speed, that’s not actually the case. They help you to keep your rhythm and increase momentum. Keep your elbows bent and tucked into your sides at a comfortable distance from your torso.
Download the Sweatcoin App
If you’re starting a walking program to improve your fitness, this is the perfect time to download the Sweatcoin app. It’s free to download – and you can make money using it. For every 1000 steps you make, you earn 1 SWC which you can use to spend with our online partners.
1 mile equals 2 SWC.
It pays to walk.
