In just one hundred days you can step up, step out, and get moving toward a more healthy style.
This walking program has been developed by health care experts at Cleveland Clinic to help you initiate a healthy walking program. These can be your first steps toward a healthier, more active you. With lifestyle change, the first 100 days are the most critical in setting the foundation for a long-term behavior change that can carry you over the next 30 years. Let the "Walk for Good" program help you take that first step toward a healthier lifestyle.
The 15-week "Walk for Good" program was designed for the novice or beginning walker. To optimize the benefits of exercise, the best research available tells us that walking should be conducted on most (if not all) days of the week, totaling approximately 60 minutes per day. At 45 minutes of moderate paced walking, six days a week, you are gaining significant cardiovascular benefits and will have increased your weekly caloric expenditure from walking by approximately four times as compared to the first week of the program.
Regular, long term activity, such as walking, when coupled with appropriate dietary practices, can have a significant impact on preventing or delaying diabetes, coronary artery disease and cancer.
Not only can you prevent or delay chronic diseases, listed below are all the great benefits of walking:
You can walk anywhere, at no cost.
Walking creates a safer community, allows you to meet people, and get the lay of the land in your neighborhood.
Walking is easier on the joints than running, and helps to prevent osteoporosis.
Walking increases your energy level and can slow as well as prevent the aging process.
Walking decreases the risk of chronic disease, increases wellness, and decreases medical costs because you are more healthy.
Improvements in health and reduction in risk of heart disease and cancer are seen with even small increases in activity.
Moderate intensity physical activity can lower blood pressure, improve cholesterol profile, improve insulin sensitivity and decrease diabetes incidence.
If you walk with a partner, walking can serve as a social activity, can keep your mind sharp, and allows bonding time to reduce stress.
If you walk the dog, you can prevent canine overweight (an expanding problem also).
Walking can be used as time for mind clearing. With busy schedules, "It all adds up", 15 min here, 20 min there.
Even after just 4 years of follow up, people who newly adopt a healthy lifestyle in middle-age, experience a prompt benefit of lower rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality.
