Yes, walking can help your meet your fitness goals. A sports medicine physician shares a step-by-step guide to burning fat without breaking into a jog.
Fat-burning workouts don’t have to end in a puddle of sweat and tears. There are all kinds of ways to lose weight with exercise. Heck, you can even walk it off.
In fact, if you’re at the beginning of your fitness journey or simply don’t have the time for more involved training sessions, walking could be your primary weight-loss workout. “Either way, whether you’re a fitness nut or someone just getting started, walking has weight-loss benefits—for all kinds of people,” says Irvin Sulapas, MD, sports medicine physician and associate professor at UTHealth Houston.
Walking doesn’t have to be boring, either. While you can certainly shed pounds just strolling through your neighborhood, playing with variables like incline, heart rate, and even intervals can all help to not only break the monotony but actually accelerate your results. Here are a couple of ways to maximize your weight loss by simply putting one foot in front of the other.
Make sure you’re getting the minimum effective dose
“When it comes to slow cardio—or cozy cardio, as people are calling it now—every little bit counts, even if it’s low impact,” says Dr. Sulapas. “Even if you walk for just a couple of minutes, that can actually help you to slowly build your cardio fitness and endurance.”
But if you’re hoping to see noticeable weight-loss results in the near term, you’ve got to put the time in.
“If losing weight is your primary goal, I usually recommend 60 minutes per session, and doing that up to five days a week,” Dr. Sulapas says. “It’s a lot, but if you start getting to above 10,000 steps a day, or even up to 20,000 steps, it can really help with weight loss.”
Get in your (heart rate) zone
When you exercise, your body prioritizes either fat or carbs for fuel. And the good news is you get to decide which one goes to the front of the queue. Generally speaking, exercising below 70 percent of your maximum heart will burn mostly fat. And the harder you work, without crossing that line, the more fat you’ll burn—hence why the “fat-burning zone” (what people mean when they talk about zone 2 cardio) is between approximately 60 and 70 percent of your maximum heart rate. If you’re walking primarily to burn fat, you’ll want to spend as much time as possible in this range.
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There is a bit of a buy-in, though. “During the first 15 to 20 minutes of a steady-state walk or run, you’re first going to be burning your immediately available carbs—whatever sugars you’ve eaten that day,” Dr. Sulapas says. Once those immediate stores are spent, provided you’re working at under 70 percent of your max heart rate, your body will then begin prioritizing fat for energy. “Typically that happens at around the 20 minute mark, which is why I recommend at least 30 minutes [of walking for weight loss],” Dr. Sulapas says. “Doing it for five to 10 minutes is not going to be enough. You’ll want to do at least around 30 minutes.”
Spice up your stroll with intervals
Walking doesn’t have to be an endless slog at a steady pace. You’ve probably heard of high-intensity internal training, or HIIT, where you alternate between short bouts of intense exercise and brief rest periods for a set number of rounds. This type of training is popular for its higher calorie burn and sharper effect on increasing V02 max compared with steady-state cardio. Well, high-intensity interval walking is a thing, too.
In a 2007 study, published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, researchers in Japan investigated how walking at a slow, steady pace compared with walking in an interval format, alternating between periods of high and low effort. Participants in the steady-state group were instructed to walk at least 8,000 steps per day, four days a week, at about 50 percent effort. Those in the interval group also exercised four days a week, but they were told to organize their walks into five sets, with each set consisting of a three-minute round at 70 percent effort followed by a three-minute recovery at 40 percent effort. By the end of the five-month study, people in the interval group had significantly improved their strength and aerobic capacity in relation to the steady-state group—both factors that help your body burn fat more efficiently—while also lowering their resting blood pressure.
Jack up the treadmill’s incline
The beauty of walking your way to weight loss is that you can literally do it anywhere. But if you happen to have access to a treadmill at home or at your gym, you can increase the fat-burning potential of your steps with the push of a button. “If you’re walking on a treadmill and you can increase the incline by just a couple of degrees, that can actually burn more calories,” Dr. Sulapas says.
A 2025 study published in the International Journal of Exercise Science found that walking on a treadmill that’s been set to an incline can even burn more calories than a moderate-effort run. In that study, participants spent 30 minutes walking at three miles per hour on a treadmill set to an incline of 12 percent, testing the TikTok-popular (and actually good) 12-3-30 workout. By the end of the study, subjects in the walking group had burned more fat than those in the running group, while maintaining a lower rate of energy expenditure.
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Take note of your terrain
Whether you’re walking on the treadmill or lacing up a pair of trail shoes, being mindful of your terrain can help you get more out of your training and even avoid an unnecessary injury. If you’ve got a considerable amount of weight to lose, or it’s been a while since you last logged a five-figure step count, going off-road could be a gentler entry point. “Walking on a trail can be much easier on the knees, because there’s a lot more give on the trail compared with walking on concrete or asphalt,” Dr. Sulapas says.
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And while the treadmill might seem like a one-to-one swap for walking on solid ground, there’s actually some nuance involved there, too. Due to the way your feet are subtly pulled back by the tread’s belt, your lower-body muscles aren’t taxed to the same extent as they are outside. But there’s an easy fix for this. “If you’re going to be using the treadmill in place of walking outside, you should actually increase that incline by one to two degrees to help mimic the resistance that you get from the road or from the outdoors,” Dr. Sulapas says. “Of course, sometimes when the weather gets bad, if you only have access to a treadmill, that’s what you have. But if you want to simulate an outdoor walk or run, then I would suggest you increase the incline slightly.”
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