Determining the Intensity of Your Walk

By Liz Neporent


If you’re just casually strolling around the neighborhood to improve your overall health, then the total accrual of miles, minutes, and calories is more important than high intensity. But even so, it still makes sense to pay attention to how hard you’re working so that you don’t overdo it.

If you’re a fitness walker, then intensity is a key factor because you are trying to work up a sweat, give your heart and lungs a good workout, and burn some calories. And of course, if you’re a high-energy or race walker, you must carefully monitor your intensity level to make sure that you get into the proper training range but don’t go overboard and injure yourself.

Monitoring your heart rate

How fast your heart beats correlates directly with how hard you’re working. Your target heart rate zone is the range of heart rates that your heart should be beating for a given amount of exercise.




Rating your perceived exertion

Some enterprising exercise physiologist in the 1960s came up with a way to quantify how you feel when you’re working out. He created a chart called the RPE scale that helps you rate exercise intensity on a scale of 1 to 10.


This is just a quick, easy way to quantify how hard you think you’re working out. You take into account everything from the way your muscles feel to how hard you’re breathing and assign it a number that correlates with the level of difficulty you’re working at.

The talk test

The talk test is the simplest way to gauge exercise intensity. By speaking aloud — even if you don’t have anyone to talk to — you can tell how hard you’re working.

If you can sing the latest Madonna tune at the top of your lungs as you walk along, you obviously aren’t working hard enough to gain any health benefits. Fitness walkers should be able to offer snatches of breathless conversation, and race walkers shouldn’t really be able to speak during the peak of their workouts, but they should be able to throw out a breathless word or two here or there. Regardless of the type of walk you engage in, if you can’t utter a single sound other than gasping for air, you’re working too hard and need to slow down.