Cardio. Urgh. The very word sends shivers down the spine of many a woman who’s tried to lose weight or get healthy over the years.

The mind-numbing hours spent walking on treadmills or plodding along on cross trainers. Hours of your life you aren’t getting back. Hours you could have spent with your kids, grandkids, partner, family, friends or just chilling out by yourself.

And what’s more frustrating is the fact that after a while, it doesn’t really work, does it? An hour on the treadmill really doesn’t get the weight off you once your body has adapted to it. You need a better way.

Enter: the 10 minute walk. I know, walking for 10 minutes isn’t exactly revolutionary, but it really can transform your health and body composition.

This strategy was popularised by Stan Efferding, and essentially involves taking a short, 10 minute walk after each meal throughout the day. No running, no treadmills, no crazy cardio. Just open your front door, and walk.

Okay, so you’re probably not sold on this as a strategy yet. I get it. Let me explain what happens when you take a brisk 10 minute walk after every meal…

The most obvious benefit of 10 minute walks is that it improves your overall activity levels for the day. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t burn the most calories in the gym. You burn the most calories across the other 23 hours of the day combined. So, the more active you are during these hours, the more calories you’ll burn, the fitter you’ll get, and the more weight you’ll lose.

A great metric to track how active you are over the course of a day is your step count. If you’re sitting down all day long and never getting any activity until your gym session in the evening, your step count probably won’t be much higher than 3000. By introducing three 10 minute walks across the day, you can probably double that number (a 10 minute walk at a decent pace is usually around 1000 steps).

Not only this, but the aches and pains you’ve been getting through being sat at your desk, sofa or car all day in the hips, knees and back will start to ease due to the fact you’re moving your body more often and getting some movement and blood flow into these sore joints to keep them mobile.

Another transformational benefit of regular 10 minute walks is the effect they can have on insulin sensitivity. Insulin is the hormone responsible for allowing glucose entry into each cell so it can be used as energy. However, in many of us (especially if we’re a little overweight), our cells become resistant to insulin, meaning blood sugar stays high for much longer and we suffer all sorts of health issues as a result. The most obvious health issue than can develop as a result of insulin resistance is type 2 diabetes, but all manner of health conditions can be downstream of insulin resistance, including Alzheimer’s dementia, PCOS, mental health disorders and even cancer to name a few.

Ten minute walks after meals have been shown to improve insulin sensitivity by up to 30%. This is a huge deal, because if you can become more sensitive to insulin, you not only reduce your risk of getting one of the horrendous health conditions I mentioned above, but you also have a much easier time losing body fat and holding on to lean muscle. Considering all you have to do is walk for 10 minutes after a meal, that’s not a bad trade off in my book.

Being outside is good for your health. Getting sunlight into your eyes and on your skin is a fantastic free health supplement. The sunnier days are best, but even on cloudy days you’ll be topping up your vitamin D stores (which help with calcium absorption into bone, sleep quality and other effects), improving your nitric oxide stores (which helps to lower blood pressure) and suppressing the hormone melatonin – which will bounce back at night and make us feel super sleepy at bedtime (improving sleep duration and quality, another fantastic health bonus). Again, all of this for a 10 minute jaunt around the block. It really is a no-brainer.

Secondly, by spending time outside you’ll notice an improvement in your mental health. Constant time indoors looking at screens narrows our focus, switches on our fight or flight system and increases our anxiety. Being outdoors, especially in natural surroundings like woods, beaches, lakes or fields, can switch on our rest and digest system, widen our focus and lower our anxiety. A mental health bonus all around.

10 minute walks have an added benefit of improving the digestion of the meal that you’ve just eaten. Gentle movement like walking helps the motility of the gut, keeping the food moving through the digestive system and prevents inflammation and irritation of the gut. This means you absorb nutrients better and symptoms of leaky gut and IBS can start to ease off.

There’s also the benefit of nutrient partitioning during your 10 minute walks. This means that any nutrients circulating your bloodstream will be shuttled into muscle cells preferentially when you’re walking, as opposed to floating around the bloodstream looking for a home and causing inflammation and mayhem.

Finally, moving more often in the couple of days after a heavy gym session is one of the best ways to combat muscle soreness. Going on 10 minute walks will improve the blood flow to the areas that are sore in your body and speed up recovery from the workout, meaning you heal faster and can get back in the gym sooner. This results in an increased readiness to train, meaning you can make more progress in less time. Or, just enjoy the benefits of working out really hard without getting really sore!

In summary, a ten minute walk after each meal has a long list of benefits. And considering the cost is £0.00 and it only takes you 10 minutes, I see this strategy as one of the best all-time hacks I’ve ever found for health, wellbeing and weight loss, and I’d encourage you to give it a try for a week and see how much better you feel.

If you want more tips or coaching to help you lose weight and get healthy, consider joining our ladies only over 40s fitness group on Wheatley Hall Road in Doncaster by clicking here:

Thanks for reading, and here’s to your health and wellbeing

Andy