Thursday, November 27, 2008

Turkey Day Maximum Fat Burn

Well I got a good pre-thanksgiving meal workout in. Spent 1:18:33 in my home gym. 31:00 minutes on weights, core, abs and threw some leg presses in. Then I hit the treadmill for some walking. It is so hard not to run. Especially when you look at the beautiful weather we are having today. Sunny and 55 or so at 11:30am. Perfect running weather. But, since I had to hold back for a few more days, I challenged myself to see how fast or how much faster I could get just walking.

Actually speed walking is kind of fun. It's a lot like running but you just don't get the miles done as fast. I'm sure there are ways to increase the pace and if I was stuck to walking I'd start playing around with different techniques. As it is I just want to see how much I can improve from the last time. I do know that swinging your arms like in running makes walking faster much easier.

So I started out at 4.0 mph on the treadmill then pretty quickly increased it to 4.3. Varied the incline from flat to 3.0 just get some hills in. Most of the time my heart rate was around 160 or a little less which is almost but not quite where my marathon heart rate normally is. Ended up doing 3 miles in 42:55 which is a 14:18 pace. Kind of funny that I'm trying to lower my pace walking. Again, it really was not bad, even on the dreadmill. It was a fast pace, had to keep my legs turning over pretty good but never running or jogging. Had my garmin on to keep up with my heart rate and it showed an average of 145 for 1:18:33. It didn't calculate my calories for some reason but from experience on the bike, this gets me probably around 1100 calories burnt. Now I can go eat!!

Next time your bored with running or just don't want the impact, try some fast walking and just see how fast you can walk 3 miles. Maybe it will help in your next marathon or event. If nothing else, the lower heart rate will burn a ton of calories.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

1 comment:

Susan said...

I did the opposite; I speed walked 3.1 AFTER dinner!