Is walking every day enough to keep me healthy?

• Walking is a great foundation for your health, but it isn’t the only type of exercise you need.
• Strength training helps preserve muscle and mobility as you age—and just two sessions a week can help.
• Adding short bursts of intensity to your walks can improve your cardiovascular fitness without overhauling your routine.

Q: I go for a walk every day and I love it—but should I be doing more than that to stay healthy?

Walking is a phenomenal low-impact exercise that nearly everyone can do. People who walk consistently tend to live longer and have a lower risk of premature death, better manage their weight, and report reduced feelings of anxiety and depression.

But if you’re looking for a more well-rounded fitness regimen, you’ll need to do a bit more than walking—especially if your goal is to stay strong and mobile into your later years.

That’s because different types of exercise challenge your body in different ways. Walking primarily works your cardiovascular system, helping keep your heart and lungs healthy. Strength training challenges your muscles and bones, while higher-intensity exercise pushes your heart and lungs harder, improving your cardiorespiratory fitness. Together, they provide a more complete approach to staying healthy as you age.

Strength training stands out as a necessary addition to any workout routine. When your body works against an external weight—free weights, resistance bands, or even your own body weight—your muscles experience stress and microscopic damage. That’s a good thing. Your body then swoops in and begins repairing that damage, which can lead to muscle growth and improved strength.

Having enough muscle is especially important as you age. Once you hit your 30s, your body slowly starts to lose muscle mass at a rate of about 3-5% every decade—around age 65, that loss can accelerate significantly; some people can lose up to 1% of their muscle mass each year.

Adding some high-intensity exercise to your week can also supplement walking and strength training. It doesn’t have to be much—workouts like high-intensity interval training (HIIT) involve short bursts of intense exercise (think: sprinting or hard cycling) followed by periods of rest or active recovery. You don’t have to sprint, though. Even brief periods of brisk uphill walking or walking as fast as you comfortably can count as vigorous exercise for many people. The important part is elevating your heart rate and getting a little out of breath.

HIIT workouts are efficient and can increase your VO₂ max—the amount of oxygen your body can take in and use during exercise. A higher VO2 max is a sign of better cardiorespiratory fitness, which is linked to a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and premature death. Some research also suggests HIIT may help preserve lean muscle during weight loss.

Since you’re already walking every day, you have a good baseline for physical activity. On top of that, you can start adding in strength training with two full-body sessions a week. Stick to classic moves like deadlifts, squats, and overhead presses, since they’re functional movements and engage all the major muscle groups. If you’re new to strength training, start with whatever feels most approachable—whether that’s bodyweight exercises, resistance bands, or free weights—and gradually increase the challenge as you get stronger.

Picking up the pace on your daily walks can cover some high-intensity work. If you’re on flat ground, alternate between speeding up for 30 seconds and walking at a moderate pace for two minutes. If you’re in a hilly area (or walking on a treadmill), you can switch out walking faster for walking on an incline. The main goal is to elevate your heart rate a few times throughout your workout—aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity or 75 minutes of high-intensity activity weekly.

Read the original article on Health