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Did you know that the average adult American sits for approximately six and a half hours a day? If you’re an office worker and you sit at your desk for the most part of your workday, you’re at risk of developing health issues related to sitting for too long, especially if you live a non-active lifestyle. One of the ways that you can lessen your non-active sitting time is to do desk exercises that can reduce muscle stiffness, encourage blood flow, and keep you more active as the day goes on.
While exercising at your desk can greatly help, one thing that you can do to be more active and burn more calories is to walk to work. Walking has a ton of benefits: it can improve your health, loosen up tight muscles, help you stay fit, and even boost your mental function and well-being. With those benefits and more, walking can certainly be an exercise that’s simple enough for everyone; however, it may not always be easy to do. A lot of factors can make walking a feat to do, it may be because of the weather, or your shoes, or maybe you’ve simply grown bored of walking the same route every day.
If you’re experiencing a slump when it comes to walking to work, try out the following tips!
How To Maximize Your Walk to Work and Make it More Interesting
Sticking with the same walking routine can feel monotonous at some point. By making your walk to work more interesting, you’ll be able to challenge yourself further, prevent boredom, and keep yourself energized and excited to stick to a walking workout. Use any of these tips or try a combination of them to maximize your walk to work.
Challenge and Reward Yourself
Set small challenges that you can do on your walking route. Try and see if you can do your route in a faster time by alternating between your average pace and brisk walking. You can make use of landmarks that you pass by every day to measure the time it takes you to get between them. You can also add ankle or wrist weights to add a little more intensity to your walk.
Of course, a challenge isn’t complete without receiving an award at the end of it. If you achieved your goal of walking faster or if you walked your entire route while wearing weights, you’ve done a great job and you deserve a reward. Acknowledge the effort that you’ve made and treat yourself to something nice, like a good cup of coffee or a breakfast treat once you get to work.
Switch Up Your Route
Going through the same path every day can make your walk turn stale over time. You might end up getting tired of seeing the same things every single day. Instead, try to switch your route by taking another street, or walking through a park and other pedestrian streets. You can even turn your walk into a mini-adventure assigning different numbers to the streets you pass by and picking a different number to walk through each day.
Walk On Different Textures
If you live in the city, chances are you’re mostly walking down pavements and not much else. Try experimenting by walking across different textures or types of ground that you see. These can be fallen leaves, a pebble path, a grassy field, and such. Walking on different types can get the small muscles in your feet moving and keep your walk more interesting.
Add An Activity Your Walk
Adding an activity such as short workouts can help make your walk more interesting. By incorporating short workouts such as stretches, jumping jacks, and the like, you can increase your muscle strength and help tone your body. They can also help you in losing more weight.
One activity that you can add to make your walk slightly challenging is stair climbing. Instead of taking the elevator when you get to your office, you can take the stairs and challenge the muscles in your lower body and core.
Incorporate Technology
With the development of technology, there are numerous gadgets on the market today that can help increase the effectiveness of your walks and let you see results more quickly. You can make use of fitness tools such as a pedometer or a fitness tracker that can log how many steps you’ve taken, how many calories you were able to shed, display the distance of your walk, and such. Tracking your steps can motivate you to walk more, allowing you to meet the recommended activity goals or your personal fitness goals.
Listen to Lively Music
A lot of us have our earphones in when we trek our way to work. One way that you can make your walk more interesting is by listening to songs that have 130 or 140 beats per minute. You can match your steps along with the beats, making you move more. This can get your blood pumping, giving you a cardio workout in a fun way. You can make playlists of songs with 130-140 beats per minute and switch them up once in a while so that you don’t listen to the same set of songs every time you walk.
Learn and “Read” While Walking
Aside from listening to music, you can maximize your walk to work by loading up an audiobook, allowing you to “read” throughout your route. If you’re not the type to listen to audiobooks, you can turn your walk into an educational session by listening to various podcasts. There’s a podcast for almost every topic out there. You can tune in to a podcast that can help you learn a language, listen to one that covers news around the world, or maybe listen to a motivating podcast, and so on. The choices are endless.
Invite Your Friends
Walking alone can certainly get quite boring. Instead of being by your lonesome self, you can turn walking into a social activity by inviting your friends or co-workers along. You can use this as a way to connect with others if you wish to do so. You can do this in person or, if you don’t have any friends living near your area, you can make great use of technology by calling them, turning it into a sociable virtual walk.
If you’re new to walking to work or walking workouts in general, start by walking 10 to 15 minutes a day and then gradually build your time and speed. Once you find your footing, you can increase your time by a few during each walk. If you’re someone who has incorporated walking to work in your everyday routine, doing activities or changing your route can make your walks more interesting.
