By Khushi Maheshwari 

Walking is an excellent kind of exercise if you could only do one thing for the rest of your life. It’s among the easiest and most convenient types of physical activity. It’s also reasonably priced and free.

Though it has many advantages, most people only consider walking as a means of transportation from point A to point B. Walking is fantastic for your heart and circulation, helps you lose weight, improves your brain and creative faculties, balances your mood, speeds up your metabolism, encourages deeper sleep, and much more. You may make your regular stroll into a full-body workout by adding a few innovative strategies.

Just picture transforming your stroll into a workout that targets your arms, shoulders, core, and even your head! It’s not as hard as you would think, and you don’t need expensive equipment or a gym membership.

All set to exude enthusiasm on your walk? Here are some tips from Rohit Sakunia, the founder of ArtE Media Tech, a pan-India full-stack agency, on how to make your stroll productive from head to toe.

Certainly! Here’s an expanded and fully paraphrased version with additional detail:

1. Energize Your Walking Stride: Speed walking isn’t just for leisurely strolls anymore. Boost your pace to elevate your heart rate and maximize calorie expenditure. Focus on maintaining proper posture—shoulders back, core engaged—and swing your arms vigorously. Picture it as a purposeful, strong march. If you track your steps with a pedometer, challenge yourself with intervals of faster walking. Achieving and surpassing these challenges provides a rewarding dopamine rush, boosting motivation and satisfaction with your workout.

2. Integrate Interval Training: Keep your walking routine dynamic by incorporating intervals of higher intensity. Alternate between brisk walking and short bursts of faster walking or light jogging. This approach keeps your body adaptable and enhances cardiovascular fitness over time.

3. Incorporate Arm Exercises: Why limit your workout to your legs? Enhance your routine by carrying light hand weights or using water bottles for exercises such as bicep curls, shoulder presses, or triceps extensions as you walk. This transforms your walk into a comprehensive full-body workout, enhancing muscular endurance and toning your arms effectively.

4. Make Use of Terrain: Seek out inclines or stairs during your walk to add variety and challenge. Walking uphill engages your glutes, hamstrings, and calves more intensely while also improving cardiovascular endurance. For an added challenge and to target your lower body further, try incorporating lunges uphill.

5. Engage Your Core: Focus on maintaining a strong core by practicing good posture throughout your walk. Activate your abdominal muscles by pulling your belly button in towards your spine. Additionally, include standing side crunches or twists to target your obliques, improving core stability and strength.

6. Incorporate Walking Lunges: Break up the monotony of a straight walk by integrating walking lunges into your route. Pause every few minutes to perform a set of lunges, which not only strengthen your legs and glutes but also enhance your balance and flexibility over time.

7. Utilize Resistance Bands: Add variety and resistance to your workout by bringing along resistance bands. Perform exercises like rows, chest presses, side steps, and squats to target different muscle groups. These portable pieces of equipment increase the intensity of your movements, promoting muscle strength and toning during your walk.

8. Add Dynamic Moves: Infuse enjoyment and variety into your routine with playful and dynamic movements such as skipping, side shuffles, or high knees. These not only elevate your heart rate but also make your workout more enjoyable and less predictable.

By integrating these strategies into your walking regimen, you’ll not only enhance your physical fitness but also keep your workouts engaging and effective. Each element targets different facets of fitness—from cardiovascular health and calorie burn to muscle strength and flexibility—ensuring a comprehensive and rewarding exercise session every time you step out for a walk.

Notable features: Fabric band, sleep tracker, no screen display, membership required, 1.5-meter water resistance, no GPS | Battery life: 5 days | Connectivity: iOS and Android compatible, Whoop app

This discreet black strap doesn’t have a screen or any type of display, but if you’re looking for a fitness tracker to give you a holistic view of your overall health, I’d recommend giving the Whoop a try — especially if you’re focused on performance. It measures your strain, or your daily exertion, and gives you a recovery score, which is a combination of metrics measured by the strap sensor (heart-rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep performance, and respiratory rate). Whoop says the higher your recovery score, the more prepared your body is for physical activity. I like using this strap not only for tracking my daily activities (you can’t view your stats during the activity because of the lack of a screen — only on the app afterward) but also for all the time I spend not doing them, such as when I’m resting and sleeping. While other fitness-tracking apps will simply tell me how much sleep I got, I found Whoop’s reports to be much more detailed. It will not only tell me how much time I spent in deep sleep and how many times I woke up, but if I have a less-than-ideal night of sleep, it will calculate how much more sleep I need the next night to make up for poor sleep quality. Its heart-rate sensor will also tell me how much time I spent in a high-stress zone during the day, which is helpful to know throughout the workday. All of this granular tracking might feel exhaustive, but for athletes who geek out on metrics, the Whoop can offer much more data beyond step count and heart rate.

Lots of top athletes (including professional basketball player Sue Bird and Citius Mag founder Chris Chavez) use the Whoop strap. It’s also a good choice for weekend warriors looking to maximize their fitness. Rex Chatterjee, creative director of the digital-media firm Dune Road Lifestyle and a former competitive bodybuilder, says Whoop gives him a holistic view of his body’s current state, and Rachel Lapidos, senior lifestyle-and-beauty editor at Bustle, likes how, compared to a tracker that only measures steps or distance, Whoop provides more personalized feedback on her workouts. “With the recovery score, I feel like I’m doing my body more of a favor since I know that if my score is low, I should take it easy rather than push myself, and vice versa,” she says.

Anthony Chavez, a master trainer at CorePower Yoga, is also a Whoop fan, and like Chatterjee, he appreciates the focus on overall health and behavior. “I’ve even begun to notice trends in the metrics based on how hydrated I am or how a glass (or two) of wine will affect my sleep and overall recovery the next day,” he says. Andrea Fornarola, founder of the barre and dance-fusion studio Elements Fitness, calls the Whoop her “newest obsession,” and Nathan Forster, CEO and founder of the on-demand workout platform NEOU, says it’s his tracker of choice. Swerve instructor-operations director Jenna Arndt and SoulCycle master instructor Maddy Ciccone mention Whoop’s “strain coach,” which, as Arndt explains, guides you “how hard to push based on your recovery level.” And the strap doesn’t come with GPS, so you can’t track distance on a run by wearing the strap alone. You can, however, use the Whoop app on your phone during a distance activity and use GPS tracking for your workout that way.

These are his confessions.

Usher revealed his daily diet and exercise regimen to maintain his fit physique, which includes fasting on Wednesdays, cayenne pepper drinks and meditation.

“Typically I wake up and drink celery juice. I’ve been doing this concoction of lemon, ginger, water and cayenne pepper. I drink it hot,” he told the Wall Street Journal in a new interview published Monday.

“I try to wake up early enough to have a moment of reflection. Some days I may grab a book and read to stimulate my mind. I may sit quietly and meditate. One thing that is a frequent practice is yoga. It really does help to activate my organs and get my mind moving in the right direction.”

For breakfast, the “U Got It Bad” singer, 45, said he sometimes likes to eat “eggs scrambled with cheese” but he mostly likes his eggs “poached or over easy.”

However, Usher shared that he doesn’t like to eat breakfast before he’s “worked out or done something physical,” like “taking a walk, stretching or doing yoga, sitting in the sun and raising my body’s natural heat levels.”

The eight-time Grammy winner also said he fasts in the middle of the week because it’s something his “grandmother practiced.”

“I fast on Wednesdays. I typically try to start around 11 p.m. the previous day, then go the entire day on Wednesday just drinking water,” he told the outlet.

As for what Usher’s fitness regime involves, the pop star usually starts with “walking or certain knee activations.”

“I’ve had minor surgeries on my knee, I had a torn meniscus. Other than that, swimming is a really good thing to get me going and bike riding. Weight lifting, don’t do a lot of that,” he explained.

In February, Usher headlined the 2024 Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

During his 15-minute set, he performed a plethora of his hits song, including “My Boo,” “OMG” and “Yeah!”

Although the “Confessions” singer made it look easy on stage, he told WSJ that the halftime show was “one of the hardest 15 minutes that I’ll ever have in my life” and that he had to work out every day to execute the show the way he wanted to.

“I didn’t really have the time to do a lot of other things,” he said. “I was remedying my body the night before and waking up the next day and eating a very regimented, low-carb diet.”