The Five-minute Rule Experts Agree will Help Kickstart your Walking Habit

Whatever your goal with walking, the hardest part is often getting started. There are many things you can do to make it a habit and keep it up, but the best approach is to start small.

The experts all agree that beginning with a five-minute walk will set you up for success, especially if you haven’t been that active in a while.

“This is something that can’t go from zero to 100 straight away… You’ve got to let your body build up to build that fitness, and that’s really important. So, you start small… and then slowly but surely, you’ll be able to build that up over time,” Elizabeth Calleja, Senior Advisor Physical Activity at the Heart Foundation, tells nine.com.au.

One way to get an extra five or 10 minutes of walking in is to add it into what you’re already doing by taking the stairs, getting off a bus or train stop earlier or parking further away from your destination.

“Even if you just did that, you could easily add like an extra 10, 15, 20 minutes to your week [of walking], maybe more,” Dr Kelly Gough, clinical psychologist and President of the Australian Psychological Society, said. 

A benefit to incorporating short walks into your day this way is that you’ll soon find you’re meeting the current Australian physical activity guidelines. The recommendation is for 30 minutes most days of the week of moderate to vigorous physical activity. 

“You should be achieving that, but everything counts. There have been studies to show that even doing 10 minutes or more [of physical activity] actually helps to improve cardiovascular fitness,” Calleja said.

Thinking about what works best for you to get walking and keep it up helps because everyone is different.

“A lot of the time when we’re talking to clients or patients, we’ll try and individualise it… Do it with a friend if you’ve got that personality that you’re more likely to do it with someone. Dog walking is, for some people, a really good way of getting out the door every morning and going for a walk,” Professor Jeff Coombes, School of Human Movement Studies at the University of Queensland, said.

If you’re someone who likes to walk in a group, the Heart Foundation has walking groups you can join. There are currently 50,000 people using the initiative and 800 groups operating around the country.

“The walking groups are run at different times, different days, depending on the group itself. Some go once a week, some go three times a week, some do a monthly bushwalk, and they’ll go to different locations,” Calleja said.

“A lot of the walks will stay and have coffee afterwards; one of my favourite quotes from our walkers is, ‘They come for the walk, but they stay for the talk’ and that social connectedness is one of the most important factors for our walkers in our annual walker survey.”

Whether you walk by yourself or with others, setting goals is helpful. But just like the five-minute rule for getting started, small, realistic and flexible goals are best.

“There’s new evidence to show that having what’s called open goals, that’s been developed by researchers in Australia – Christian Swann is the academic on that – is actually more helpful for people to feel like they’re not failing,” Calleja explained.

“You just say [for example], ‘Oh, I want to walk more this week’, and then you can set little small steps every day to get towards achieving that goal… you might want to start out to say, ‘I’m doing 10 minutes today, and I’m going to add 5 minutes later in my lunch break’ and build that up.”

But if you miss a day or aren’t able to walk for as long as you planned that’s OK. Instead of feeling bad you can use it as an opportunity to have a think about whether there is anything getting in the way of your habit that you can tweak moving forward.

“Be kind to yourself if you don’t manage to do it, don’t worry about that, you don’t have to be perfect, just have another go the next day,” Dr Gough said.

Source: www.nine.com.au