Increase your calorie burning while walking
Walking is the most popular physical activity in the world. In the early morning, during the day, in the evenings, or even at night, you can watch dozens of sweaty people engaging in it. If you happen to focus on the gait of the various walkers who have become acquainted with you on your way, you must have noticed that they differ from each other in hand movement: while the "amateurs" maintain a natural movement of the arms and pay no attention to it, the more "serious" walkers swing their arms vigorously. To shoulder height, relative to step size and walking speed.
Performing these vigorous movements is done to increase walking speed, by improving walking efficiency and leg movement the same way short-distance runners perform movements with their hands to accelerate body movement.
Although walking is an available natural exercise with many beneficial health effects, its main disadvantage is that the degree of effort it requires is limited. While competitive style walking is done at a rate of about 14-15 km / h, in natural walking the maximum speed of a person at an average altitude is about 7 km / h.
The role of the hands while walking
The main purpose of vigorous hand lifts is to help the movement of the legs by creating an increased movement of the upper body and pelvis. It also helps to increase the muscular activity of the shoulder girdle and thus increase the rate of calorie burning.
Surprisingly, the exact role of arm movement while walking is still not entirely clear. The hand movements have several functions, ranging from improving the stability of the pelvis, especially in situations of loss of balance, reducing the oscillations of the center of gravity up and down, and reducing the rotational movement created in the pelvis.
From all these roles it appears that the main function of the arm movement is to stabilize the body while walking on two legs and thereby achieve more efficient walking. Studies have found that walking with the hands close to the chest and without movement leads to a 7% increase in energy expenditure.
Movement of the hands as balances of the pelvic area is mostly passive, like a jerk, and in the small part is active and is caused by the activity of a small muscle group in the front and back of the shoulder. Hence the thought that more vigorous activity of the hands will increase the muscular mass involved in walking and help in accelerating the body.
Are you raise your hands?
A study published in the journal Biology Open asks the question of how vigorous movement of the hands affects the action of walking. During the study, subjects were asked to walk at different speeds while changing the movement of the arms: from walking with arms close to the body, movement of one arm, natural movement, to the excessive lifting of the arms.
The study found that natural hand movement optimally reduces the shocks the body absorbs from the ground. Natural hand movement also balances the body and reduces the rotational movements of the back and pelvis until the rotational forces around the pelvis are equal to zero. As a result of these changes energy efficiency increases and becomes more economical.
As for making excessive movements that are too large with the arms that do not match the walking pace, It turns out that movements that are too large can cause overcompensation and impair the efficiency of walking, and in practice slow down the pace of walking and make it difficult for the walker to walk faster.
When you want to burn more calories while walking, it has been found that excessive movement has led to an increase in caloric expenditure of about 5%. This is due to the large activity of muscle groups in the shoulder girdle area, and also to the reason that hand movement interferes with pelvic stabilization, resulting in less energy-efficient and less economical walking.
In conclusion, for those who want to improve walking speed and help the body progress through vigorous action of the hands, it is important to know that while this is a good way to increase caloric expenditure, it does not cause a significant improvement in walking speed relative to the effort invested. For this reason, it is not recommended to perform prolonged walks in this way, but it is possible to perform large shifts for short sections to increase caloric expenditure.
