Going for a long walk has always been one of life’s simple pleasures. Now that we’re all living in lockdown, it also offers a blessed reprieve from life in lockdown. In a new video, YouTube’s Simple Man takes the long, solitary walk and turns it into a fitness challenge, setting himself the target of covering 100 miles in the space of a week.
In order to meet his goal, he needs to walk around 14.3 miles per day, or 31,000 steps. By his own count, he can cover 1,000 steps in 8 minutes at his regular pace, meaning he has to walk for 4 hours each day to meet his target.
While that might sound pretty simple, all that walking soon takes its toll on his body. “Come day six, my body was wearing down,” he says. In addition to the extreme physical fatigue that he accrues over the week, his feet ended up pretty beaten up, and he loses a toenail. On the plus side, he begins to notice some increased definition in his calf muscles.
By the end of the week, he has overshot his original goal and walked 109.32 miles, or 234,000 steps. According to his own tracker, the additional physical activity has helped him burn an extra 20,140 calories. At the end of the seven days he has lost 4.2 pounds, his body fat has dropped by 0.9 percent, and he also sees a slight improvement in his blood pressure, which went from 122/88 to 117/82.
In addition to experiencing feelings of euphoria during his walks, similar to “runner’s high,” he also more bizarrely claims to have grown an inch in height during the week, possibly as a side effect of the strengthening effect all that walking had on his spine.
While he acknowledges that walking 100 miles or 234,000 steps in a single week is not exactly a practical or sustainable goal (unless you want to lose all of your toenails), the results he enjoys at the end of the challenge can be taken as evidence of the benefits of keeping up with your cardiovascular workouts.
Source: https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a32355477/walking-100-miles-one-week-body-transformation-youtube/