LOAD UP TO STRENGTHEN UP

Adding a few extra pounds to your walk is the latest way to boost your health and fitness. Here’s why you should pack your bag and step out

Why adding weight to your walking routine can deliver great results

Ever walked home from the shops with your groceries in a backpack? Or filled a rucksack with a big flask of tea and clip boxes full of food before hiking to a picnic destination? If so, you’ve already dipped your toe into tabbing, which is the latest way to get fit, build strength and muscle and, with careful technique, even future-proof your balance and bone health. So, what’s it all about? Well, tabbing (which is also known as rucking) is simply walking with a weighted backpack or rucksack on. It’s the name of a military training exercise in which troops march at a fast, timed pace while wearing a big weighted rucksack as part of their army fitness test. In military exercises, upwards of 50kg might be added to a backpack (a ‘don’t try this at home’ weight), but you don’t need to be army-fit to make health and fitness gains. By simply adding a little weight to your rucksack – say, a couple of one-litre bottles of water (combined weight of around 2kg) – to your usual walk, you’ll get a low-impact, higher-intensity walk. Right now, weighted vests, which can be worn while you go for a walk, during a workout, or simply around the house, are also causing a buzz, with everyone from Kim Kardashian to Liz Earle strapping themselves in to get more from their active time.

WEIGH THIS UP

What’s the science behind weighted walking? Simply put, adding weight to a rucksack when you walk the dog, commute or hike makes your body heavier, which in turn makes your walk more physiologically challenging. ‘Weighted walking can give you two for the price of one: cardiovascular exercise and strength work,’ says Dr Juliet Mcgrattan, a leading women’s fitness expert and author of Run Well. ‘It can increase heart rate, oxygen consumption and calorific expenditure, but also helps strengthen and tone your muscles.’ This is backed up by a slew of new studies – one found that participants who wore a weighted vest lost on average three pounds in three weeks; while another discovered that successful dieters maintained their muscle mass. This is a win/win because our natural muscle mass is thought to decline by around 1% a year from the age of 50, so anything that encourages our bodies to maintain or build muscle strength is a smart health move.

The ultimate walking to do is the walking you’ll do for ever

STEP UP YOUR STRENGTH

Walking with weights could increase bone density, helping to reduce your risk of osteoporosis. The reason? The added pressure it puts on bones nudges your body to produce new bone cells, which helps fight bone loss. In fact, one study found that wearing a weighted vest could help prevent bone loss in post-menopausal women, while another found it had the added bonus of helping improve balance and reducing the risk of falls. But it’s essential you get the weight right and strap it on well, so that it doesn’t shift and throw you off balance (see box overleaf).

There’s also good news for those who feel that weighted walking might not be best for them – perhaps due to joint pain, stability or fitness concerns, as you can also try this trend in its most pared-back form by simply swinging your arms more and better engaging your upper body. The latest research has shown that this simple tweak could increase fitness gains and the amount of calories you’re burning.

WALKING PICK-AND-MIX

Mixing things up can only be a good thing. As with our diets, variety gives us a wider range of health benefits, so trying something new like tabbing, or anything else that challenges your body in a different way, could be beneficial. ‘One day, you could do a short period of faster walking; the next day, longer spells of slower walking,’ says Dr Mcgrattan. ‘You might head for hills, which boosts cardio fitness and strength, as you’ll need to engage more of your muscles; or vary the terrain (beach, countryside, woodland), which helps with co-ordination and strengthens joints in the ankle and the smaller muscles in the foot.’ There’s heaps of inspiration, too: try Rambler’s free download at ramblers.org.uk/walkyourway; or the new ‘green routes’ on the Go Jauntly app, which uses environmental data to suggest nature-rich walking routes. You could even try walking workouts at home, perfect for when you can’t get outside. British army corporal turned personal trainer Lucy Wyndham-read, who has more than 1.85m subscribers on Youtube, has a seven-minute walking workout that squeezes in 1,000 steps.

Essentially, though, the best walking you can do is the walking that you will stick to. As Professor Nanette Mutrie, MBE, director of The Physical Activity for Health Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh, points out: ‘The ultimate walking to do is the walking that you’ll do for ever. The key is to make it enjoyable and become part of your life until it’s habit and you’re not even thinking about it.’ For this reason, Professor Mutrie believes the secret is not to force yourself to do a type of walking you don’t enjoy: ‘Yes, a fast-paced walk might have additional health benefits, but this is only up to a point. It’s only better than a slow pace if you like doing it. If you don’t, and as a result stop doing it, you’ll get no benefits whatsoever. Just doing what makes you feel good will keep you walking for life – that’s when you’ll get the real health benefits.’