I’m setting a little challenge for myself!
I always enjoy my walks with Khalee but they are usually better for my mental health than my physical health.
I have a tendency to fall into an ambling pace rather than putting much cardio effort in. And that’s fine on days when I need the mental break more that the physical exertion but on busy day when I won’t get a lot of other exercise, it would be swell if my walk did double duty.*
So, I’ve decided that I am going to try doing a 5 minute warm-up before heading out the door.
My thought here is that by warming up beforehand, I won’t be spending any of my walk warming up. Instead, I’ll be spending my walk already in a good heart rate zone.
And, since I am already in that mental and physical space, I’ll be more likely to stay in exercise mode instead of amble mode.
I’m writing this on Monday afternoon and my wrist spy reports that my heart rate average was a few points higher during our walk than it usually is. And, I felt really good about the extra effort.
One day, one reading, and a subjective report is hardly scientific but it is encouraging enough to tell me to keep trying.
I’m going to do a warmup before every walk for the next week and see how it affects my heart rate and my overall feelings about walking.
Updates as events warrant.
*This isn’t the first time I have noticed this. I wrote about it in this post about my two-speed dog back in February 2023.
At that point, I came up with a couple of things to try but my focus was more on alleviating boredom than on trying to add more of a cardio element to my walk.
I still do those things sometimes on my walk but that requires me to a) remember b) start a new ‘task.’ And if ai have already slipped into amble mode, I may not have the spare energy to initiate a new task. ADHD strikes again!
