by Paulin Soleyman

Created on: February 17, 2009   Last Updated: March 08, 2009

Health conscious individuals know the importance of staying active throughout the day. Walking is one of the easiest and most convenient ways of staying active. Leaving the car in the garage and strolling to the grocery store, going for a walk during your lunch hour or after dinner are all ways in which we can stay active and alleviate stress throughout the day.

Although the benefits of walking to our overall well-being are numerous walking as a type of exercise will not provide us with any form of cardiovascular benefit. This is because walking for pleasure as a form of exercise is simply not strenuous enough to help us reach and maintain our individual target heart rates for an extended period of time. In order to reap any form of cardiovascular benefit from walking we must walk at a pace that will increase our heart rate to the level often referred to as the target heart rate and maintain this level of heart rate for at least 30-45 minutes.

The type of walking most of us engage in throughout the day such as strolling through the mall, pushing a shopping cart down the grocery store aisles and so forth does not meet this criteria. This is because we attain our target heart rate during aerobic exercise. Target heart rate also known as The Fat Burning Zone refers to an individual's minimum level of physical exertion during which cardiovascular fitness can increase. Of course, other factors such as age and weight are also taken into account when determining an individual's target heart rate.

The Karvonen Formula is the most widely used method of determining one's target heart rate. Below is an example of the Karvonen Formula for a 65 year old male with the resting heart rate of 77 beats per minute. In order to determine your resting heart rate take your pulse for one minute after a period of at least five minutes of inactivity.

220 65(age) = 155 155 77 (resting heart rate) = 78 78 X 65% (low end of heart rate) = 50.7 or 51 78 X 85% (high end of heart rate) = 66 51+ 77 (rhr) = 128 66+77 (rhr) = 143

The target heart rate zone for this individual would be 128 at the low end of the scale and 143 at the high end of the scale.

As you can see this 65 year old subject will find it almost impossible to raise his resting heart rate from 77 beats per minute to 128 beats per minute or higher simply by walking, unless of course, he engages in power walking. This fact is also true for individuals of all age groups.

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