When Can Walking be Considered an Exercise
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When Can Walking be Considered an Exercise
Dr. Anita Brown is a New York based Physician. She actively contributes articles to http://www.HealthEnclave.com on a wide range of topics and interests. HealthEnclave is the one stop for Health, Fitness and Wellbeing. Visit http://www.HealthEnclave.com for the latest in Health and Wellbeing.
Walking is one of the affordable physical exercises, which most people ensue today. The American national guidelines urge people to perform moderate exercise for at least thirty minutes a day along five days in a week, for their physical well being. But the mystery remains how do you differentiate a leisurely stroll from exercise.
In age of Internet, where people find very less times for themselves and for their physical health, walking has become more relevant. The American national guidelines recommends approximately around 150 minutes of moderate exercises and many people who ensue walking think that they have a performed moderate physical activity, which is not always case, according to experts.
General custom among the walkers is to use pedometer, to measure their coverage of distance, through which they calibrated their moderate exercise activity level. In fact different people had different perceptions about what constitutes moderate exercise level.
But recent study conducted by assistant professor of exercise and nutritional sciences of San Diego University unveiled the fact that walkers should aim for at least 100 steps for a minute to qualify for the moderate exercise level. They advocate, that if one use their pedometer as their exercise monitor, then fix a target of 3000 steps in 30 minutes.
For their study, they observed 58 women and 39 men, while they were walking in treadmill. They also wore pedometer and heart rate monitors. Their oxygen intake was measured, when they were made to series of walk for 4 to 6 minutes, at different tread mill speeds ranging from 65 up to 110 metres per minute.
They were suppose to aim at a Metabolic Equivalent MET rate of 3, which is considered to be right level of oxygen intake required to qualify for a moderate physical activity. They later found out that men reached 3 METs level at step count of 92 to 102 steps, whereas woman reached that level in 91 to 115 steps per minute.
Their principal discovery is that, pedometer alone cannot be a reliable source to determine whether if one is walking at right intensity to reach 3 METs level. As only 50 percent of participants were correctly classified as walking in moderate intensity level using step rate alone.
But researchers do not rule out the use of pedometers, where they suggest that a useful way to start with pedometer is to accumulate 1000 steps in 10 minutes, because this is a minimum exercise time for providing benefits.
With a help of a simple pedometer and wrist watch, one can even walk outdoors inundated with fresh air and sunlight, rather than performing it inside one house in a treadmill as a mechanical activity.
Whether you have pedometer or watch it does not matter, but do not forget the mantra of at least 100 steps per minute.
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