April 28th is National Walk at Lunch day.

Scientific weight loss studies show the effectiveness of interval walking. It gets the fat-burning results of a long, hard workout but with routines as short as 20 minutes. The more weight you need to lose, the more effective interval walking is.

Walking can be the best exercise to lose weight because its easy and comfortable to do. Walking also helps:

• Boost your energy
• Strengthen your immunity
• Reduce joint pain
• Sharpen your mind
• Lower your cholesterol

If losing weight is your main objective for walking, you should interval walk and get the most bang for your effort. In other words, lose the most weight and burn off more calories in half the time.

How to get the most health benefits of walking and lose the most weight: Speed up for short periods. This will work your muscles and raise your metabolism. When you raise your metabolism, you burn fat. Then you slow it down, walk slower and relax. This is called entering the recovery period.

This one simple change in your daily walking pattern will change how your body responds to walking. If you are a regular walker, you already know that after walking a couple of miles daily or 3 or 4 times a week, whatever your schedule may be, that couple of miles becomes easier. It has become easier but something else has happened too. You are not losing the pounds like you did when you first started walking. Your muscles have adjusted to the 2 mile walk and have become more efficient. That's great but what do you do now? You can either walk more miles and spend more time walking or change your walking pattern.

By changing your walking pattern with interval walking, you will burn three times more fat by burning more calories. You will also target problem areas like belly fat. Interval walking changes how your body responds to walking. Its still walking and enjoyable but you just walk at different speeds (with a little jogging added).

You can walk for 5 minutes or so, then jog for another 5 minutes. Then, walk faster again. Slow down if you become out of breath and then sprint for a minute before you walk again. From this point, simply alternate your running and walking for the next 15 minutes until you are finished. Develop your own methods. As for myself, I walk between mailboxes, jog to the next and sprint to the next one and then take a nice deep breath and go into recovery mode.

The body continues to burn calories at a higher rate after you are finished exercising. This is called the afterburn effect. Interval walking increases this effect as much as possible so your body is still burning calories and fat at an accelerated rate while you are watching TV long after your workout is finished.Weight loss studies have shown that interval walking can burn up to nine times more fat per minute of exercise! It does this by fooling your muscles so they are constantly adjusting to new situations. As a result they don't adjust to that 2 mile walk you do. Its a totally different walk everyday and they burn more calories and you lose more fat during that 2 mile walk without increasing the distance and having to increase the time spent.

You burn more fat in less time!

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