If you google what is the best form of exercise, the result you will see will be walking. While it doesn’t burn the most calories, you can do it for a long time, it gets your heart rate up and improves your cardiovascular system, it has a relatively low impact on the body, and just about everyone can do it. So it makes walking one of the most sustainable forms of exercise for most people. Also, it’s really fun to get outdoors, maybe talk to a friend while doing it, or listen to a podcast or book and learn at the same time!

Now 10,000 steps a day has long been the suggested goal for most people, but the average American typically only gets 3000 to 4000 steps in each day.

Now I am no stranger to walking challenges. I've done several in the past, but before attempting this endeavor, I got my diet under control by changing my eating habits. I went from 198.2 pounds, down to 187.4. Then I stagnated and stayed around 188 lbs for several weeks. I knew I needed to kick it up a notch to get over this plateau.

So for the next 30 days I decided to dedicate as much time as I could to walking to find out what kind of results I could get. So here is what I found out from this experiment.

According to the data, to get the most out of your walk, you need to make sure you walk at a brisk pace. For me, this is between 3 to 4 miles per hour.

Now I know it may be difficult to gauge how quickly we are walking, so I recorded myself on the treadmill at various speeds so you can get an idea of exactly how fast you have to be walking to be at these speeds.

Here is one mile per hour
Here is two miles per hour
Here is three miles per hour
Here is four miles per hour
Here is five mile per hour


Walking around 3.5 miles per hour I can get in around 6500 steps per hour. This speed keeps my heart rate in the 110 to 120 beats per minute range.

I dedicated at least 2 hours towards strictly walking every day, some days I had more time and could dedicate 3 or 4 hours and I combined these steps with the normal number of steps I take in any given day to come up with the total number of steps I took for the day.

In the course of 30 days, I averaged 27,607 steps per day, for a grand total of 828,229 steps for the month! This comes out to a total of 414 miles for the month! That’s greater than the distance of the state of Kansas (410 miles wide)

The increased walking clearly had a positive effect on my cardiovascular system. My resting heart rate also went from 62 beats per minute to 57 beats per minute.

I found I burnt about 45 calories for every 1000 steps I took, so when you combine the burnt calories from walking with my basal metabolism rate, I burnt around 3000 calories a day.

When sticking to a healthy diet I was dropping about 2 pounds every week. This was a healthy amount of weight to lose in a week.

Diet is really a very important part of losing weight and maintaining health, that truly can’t be stressed enough. When you combine a good diet with just brisk walking, I promise you will see results.

I’ve covered my diet in a previous video, but if you missed it, I want to cover it again just to show you how just changing my diet made a huge difference in my overall health.

So with a healthy diet and over 25 thousand steps a day, my weight went from 188 pound down to 178.6 pounds over the course of 30 days. Some other impress stats that changed were:

My BMI went from 26.3 to 25
My total body fat went from 20.9% down to 18.9%
My subcutaneous fat (the fat stored in the skin) dropped from 18.2% down to 16.7%
My Visceral Fat (the fat stored around your organs went from 9 to 7

Link to my diet video: https://youtu.be/U-FkIAobrlc