Transcription
Walking is one of the best exercises for fat loss. And it was the only exercise I did when I lost over 40 lbs. That's why Cricket and I started walking 10,000 steps every day. We're both hoping it'll make us less round.
My spherical dog weighs 74 lb.
However, yesterday the YouTube algorithm decided to mess with me.
Think walking is too slow to burn fat? It's only true if you're walking the wrong way. Most people walk every day, but what if they walk wrong?
The truth is, when you walk the right way, you turn a basic walk into a fat burning furnace.
Wait, am I walking wrong?
So, this week, I'm testing the top seven expert walking hacks to see if they really do burn more fat than 10,000 steps. Starting with a new Japanese walking hack.
There's a new trend in fitness called the Japanese walking method. At least that's what you'll call it if you have a YouTube channel and you're trying to get clicks. If you're a normal person, you're probably just going to call this interval walking. Here's the superdetailed explanation of how to do it. Walk fast for 3 minutes. Walk slow for 3 minutes. Repeat until you've done 30 minutes. Apparently, I just saved you an hour and a half of explanation. But supposedly this burns more fat than steady walking, improves your cardiovascular fitness, and it's less monotonous and more exciting. Just think of this as hit training, only less impact on your joints and not as intense. So it's like kit training or bit training.
30 minutes later, ventriloquism. No, I actually enjoyed that one. In 30 minutes, I got 4,500 steps and burned 159 calories. But how does that stack up against the 10,000 steps Cricket and I have been aiming for every day? So, the videos I've seen all say that each one of these hacks burns more fat. Now, you probably heard that you need 10k steps a day to burn fat, but it's overhyped and outdated. It's not always about how many steps you do, but about what kinds of steps you're doing that make the biggest difference when it comes to your fat burning potential. That's why I'm tracking calories burned per hour. But I'm also going to factor in how doable each of these hacks are for normal people like me who apparently have been walking wrong their entire lives. Yesterday, it took us 90 minutes to walk 10,000 steps in one session. I burned a total of 417 calories, which comes out to 278 calories per hour. So, we're putting 10,000 steps right in the middle of our rankings. In comparison, interval walking burned 14% more calories at 318 per hour. It took half the time and it was kind of fun. So, I'm ranking it at the top. We're off to a great start. Come on.
And our next hack is supposedly even better. Yeah. I have no idea why I decided to do this video in winter, but this is uphill walking. The experts all say that an incline of 5 to 10% increases fat burning by 50 to 100%. This hill right here is that's pretty much 90°. I'm now fighting gravity and resistance from my body's weight. My heart rate is increasing. Each step is burning more energy. Sure, the snow makes it even harder, but I'm probably burning even more cal. Oh. Oh, good. I think I broke my protractor. Yeah, we're going to come back to this hack later cuz if this really does burn 50 to 100% more fat, I don't want to mess it up. In the meantime, let's test something that's way less intense. I've wanted an excuse to buy one of these for a while. That's way smaller than I thought it was going to be. I'm really fighting the urge not to Michael Scott that.
"That's what she said." And golly, I mean, the people in the pictures must be like 2 feet tall.
Some assembly required. Directions say it'll take 10 minutes to put together. So, I'll see you in 10 minutes.
3 hours later. NEAT. NEAT stands for non exercise activity thermogenesis, which is just a fancy way of saying calories you burn from everything that isn't working out. Experts say NEAT is underrated because it can quietly add up to hundreds of calories per day. And their favorite way to increase NEAT is an under desk treadmill. In theory, this is genius. You just walk while working. Yeah. No. Turns out it's hard to work when half your brain is dedicated to not flying off a tiny treadmill. If you sit all day and you just need more steps, this might help. But for me, it's too slow to be interesting and it's too distracting to be productive. It's not bad, but it only works if it fits your life. Also, I feel like if this worked as well as all the experts said it did, they'd be filming all their videos like this.
Okay, time to stop messing around. This next hack is the one that all the experts save until the very end. The final one can even burn more fat than jogging. That one you're not going to want to miss.
You're not going to miss it cuz I'm not making you stick around until the end. You're welcome. It's rucking where you walk with added weights. Let's go find out if it really burns more fat than jogging. You can actually purchase weighted vests for rucking, but I already spent my budget on that honey. I shrunk the treadmill gadget. So, what I've done is I put 20 lb in a backpack. Cricket's got her rucksack on, too, but there's no weight in hers. She could barely fit into it as it is. The claim is that adding weight increases the workload of every step and bumps the calorie burn by up to 10 to 15%. I'm no calorie expert, but I'm thinking jogging probably burns more calories than that. I just looked it up. It says if I joged for an hour, I'd burn around 700 calories, which is slightly greater than 10 to 15% more than 278. However, some research says rocking may prevent your metabolism from slowing down as you lose weight because your body still thinks you're heavier. That's pretty cool if it's true. An hour of rocking burn 298 calories, or about 7% more than regular walking. Not S tier, but still solid. We had fun. We worked our muscles. Yeah, we were actually sore later that evening.
The next morning, my calves hurt and my lower butt cheeks. There's just something about sore muscles that makes you stupidly confident. We've done intervals. We've done rocking. We've done whatever the dump that was. I think it's time to tackle the hill again. We're ready to die for this video. Yeah, we didn't do the hill today. I'm back on the treadmill. This is zone 2 training, the fat burning sweet spot. Supposedly, zone 2 is keeping your heart rate between 60 to 70% of your max. The equation is 220 minus your age time 6 to 7. I'll put that on screen cuz I can't do it in my head. There's something about treadmills that just make you wonder, what am I doing with my life? Wait, this feels exactly like how I normally walk. Yeah, this is just walking. After 30 minutes, I burned 143 calories. That's 286 per hour. Basically identical to my 10,000 step baseline. Not bad, not special. And if you're already walking, you're probably already doing zone 2.
The next day, Cricket got some exciting news. Cricket's down half a pound today. We haven't even done the uphill walking yet. Either this is working way better than expected or the rest of the video is going to get awkward. I'm going to throw up. Today we're testing two more hacks. But these don't actually change the level of difficulty. Actually, each walk is only 15 minutes because they change the timing. What the crap? Nailed it. First up, we have fasted walking, or walking before you eat breakfast. Experts say when insulin is low, your body burns more fat. That's what you want, buggy. They even claim that walking burns 20% more fat, which sounds amazing until you realize that 20% of 70 calories is 14, which is the equivalent of two cashews worth of food. I do a lot of walking when I do longer fasts because it helps distract me from hunger. So, if you like morning walks and skipping breakfast, this is a good one. But if you hate it, you're probably not missing out on some premium fat burning mode.
But this next hack definitely does something interesting. I actually tested this in my video on blood sugar hacks, and the results were pretty impressive. When you walk immediately after eating a meal, your blood sugar doesn't spike as high, which means insulin doesn't hang around as long. And if the insulin theory is true, this means you won't store as many calories as fat. Is it exciting? No. But is it sexy? No. But it works. And it's the easiest hack I've tested so far. Eat food, take a short walk, feel less crappy. I could get down with that. So fasted and postmeal walking may help you handle calories better, but they won't help you burn more. In order to burn more calories, you're going to have to increase the intensity. either with intervals or rucking or uphill walking.
Yes, it's finally time to test the hack everyone says burns 50 to 100% more calories. This is the hack of all hacks. So, I thought it'd be cool to get an epic drone shot of me and Cricket on top of the hill. Yeah, I I don't own a drone camera. Okay, so this hill isn't real, but this one is. I want to give this a fair chance. And since the snow won't melt, I've had to choose a hill on the road, which sadly means I don't have Cricket with me cuz I don't want her getting mushed by a car. But I'm pretty sure she's at home using the treadmill as we speak. Oh yeah, this burns my lower butt cheeks. Okay, now I'm having fun. Don't throw up. Don't throw up. Almost lost my cool there. Oh, long johns were a bad choice. How is going down somehow more painful? God, I swear if this isn't burning serious calories, I'm leaving mean comments with timestamps. Okay, we did it. 30 minutes. I'm going to leave it to future Justin to tell you how many calories I burned. It was 3,524 steps, 182 calories burned, 364 per hour. This was by far the most effective, but it was also by far the hardest. It works, but I'm not doing this all the time.
So, yeah, some of these walking hacks actually work. Others are just walking rebranded. Turns out the problem isn't that we've been walking wrong. It's that the internet can't let you do anything without adding nine rules in a thumbnail face. You don't need a weighted vest or a 90deree incline or a Japanese name for walking fast and slow. The best way to walk is the one you actually enjoy doing consistently. And if that just so happens to be walking your chunky dog around the block every day, well, yeah, you don't need a hack for that.