Can I Lose Weight By Hill Walking?

I, and many others define Hill Walking as walking in the countryside and hiking, usually carrying some form of Daysack of Backpack and wearing specialist footwear. Not just walking up and down a few steep hills in the middle of a suburban town.

Yes, you can lose weight by Hill Walking, and pretty quickly too. Normal walking such as walking around your local Park, Lake or City is a form of exercise that many people think will help them to lose weight, but don’t be fooled. Evolution has modelled our bodies over millennia to be extremely efficient at walking, so we won’t burn that many calories doing it. That is unless of course, we take our bodies out of the comfort zone of simply walking and add in some hills.

Adding hills into your walking workouts is where things become interesting in terms of weight loss.

Is Hill Walking a Good Way to Lose Weight?

Hill Walking is a good way to lose weight. It is also an extremely enjoyable and efficient way to lose weight. Let’s have a look at why.

When we go hill walking, we add in numerous other health benefits to our workout. Being in the green open spaces of nature has a relaxing and calming effect on the human mind and body. Being away from the hustle and bustle of cities and towns is also a welcome break. There is also the fact that we will be breathing in large amounts of fresh country air, which has to be better for us than sucking in exhaust fumes if we were walking around town.

Next of course is the variety of the training provided by the terrain itself. It takes a lot more effort Hill Walking on undulating terrain than it does to walk on a treadmill.

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Does Hill Walking Burn Fat?

So, does hill walking burn fat? Yes, you will burn more fat by hill walking than you would walking on flat surfaces. I always though there was a proviso like “providing you don’t over-exert yourself”. Let’s have a look at why.

Is Hill Walking a good way to Burn Fat?

Millions of years of evolution have made our bodies incredibly efficient at using minimal energy to walk on flat surfaces. It is our normal, day to day, default mode of getting around.

If we want to burn fat, we are going to have to ramp up the energy demand on our bodies a bit, and a great way to do that is to walk in the hills.

The climbs and descents will have you expending far more energy than simply walking around a park on the flat. I always thought the trick was not to over exert yourself and go into the anaerobic zone, as this will switch you from the fat burning zone to burning carbs. Until recently I believed this staying in the fat burning zone to be the correct way to burn fat, and I stuck by it religiously, but it appears that I may have been wrong. Or at least partly wrong.

How Does Our Body Get The Energy For Hill Walking?

We need energy for our hill walks, and that energy is provided in the form of Calories. We can get energy from Carbs, Protein and Fats, but our bodies much prefer to use Carbs and Fats as they are far easier to break down.

The Carbs we eat are turned to Glycogen and can provide our body with somewhere in the region of 4 calories per gram to feed our energy needs.

Fats in the form of Fatty Acids in the bloodstream provide us with around 9 calories a gram, as do the Fatty Acids from our hard to get to Fat Stores, which unfortunately get called upon to be used last.

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