Since going keto means eating fewer carbs and more fat, and since carbs are the body’s main source of fuel, it’s hard to know what type of exercise works best while in ketosis. Ketosis is when a body burns ketones instead of glucose. The Body Reboot book discusses the keto diet and ketosis in greater detail. The good news is that exercising on the keto diet is very doable and has many benefits from being healthier to feeling more energetic. Plus, there is also another exciting benefit – losing more weight! In particular, walking can help people lose more weight. This is especially the case when walking is combined with keto! Let’s see what experts have to say on how walking on keto may lead to more weight loss.

When it comes to the keto diet, there are four top ways to exercise, and it’s up to you to learn what works best for your body. If you want to lose more weight, Perfect Keto recommends trying more cardio, for example.

Aerobic exercise, also known as cardio exercise, is anything that lasts over three minutes. Lower intensity, steady-state cardio is fat burning, making it very friendly for the keto dieter.

Anaerobic exercise is characterized by shorter bursts of energy, such as from weight training or high-intensity interval training. Carbohydrates are the primary fuel for anaerobic exercise, so fat alone can’t provide enough energy for this type of workout.

Flexibility exercises are helpful for stretching out your muscle, supporting joints, and improving muscle range of motion. Increasing your flexibility can help prevent injuries caused by shortening of the muscles over time. Yoga and simple after-workout stretches are good examples of this.

Stability exercises include balance exercises and core training. They help improve your alignment, strength muscles, and control of movement.

When you’re in ketosis, the workout intensity matters as well:

During low-intensity aerobic exercise, the body uses fat as its primary energy source.
During high-intensity aerobic exercise, carbohydrates are normally the main energy source.
When you’re in ketosis, you’re using fat as your primary energy source.

Healthline reminds us that it’s important to burn more calories than you are eating to lose weight. What’s nice about the keto diet is that many people burn calories just by being on a high-fat, low-carb diet, and coupled with exercise you can increase fat burning.

It’s well known that you need to burn more calories than you consume to lose weight.

Furthermore, people who are more physically active burn more calories.

However, modern living and work environments may mean that you spend large parts of your day sitting, especially if you have an office job.

Unfortunately, a sedentary lifestyle can not only contribute to weight gain, it can also increase your risk of health problems.

Trying to get more exercise by walking more often can help you burn more calories and reduce these risks.

In fact, walking a mile (1.6 km) burns approximately 100 calories, depending on your sex and weight.

One study measured the number of calories burned by non-athletes who walked at a brisk pace of 3.2 miles (5 km) per hour or ran at a pace of 6 mph for about a mile. It found those who walked at a brisk pace burned an average of 90 calories per mile.

A study from 2008 called Med Sci Sports Exerc. backs up what Healthline mentioned above also reveals how much walking can help speed up weight loss. Combined with the keto diet imagine all the progress you might make in a shorter amount of time!

Walking as a healthful form of physical activity began to receive attention in the 1990s due to new recommendations that emphasized moderate-intensity physical activity. The main example of moderate-intensity activity in the 1995 Centers for Disease Control/American College of Sports Medicine recommendation was brisk walking at 3 to 4 mph. Evidence for the health benefits of walking comes largely from epidemiologic studies. When interpreting the data from such studies, it is necessary to consider several methodological issues, including the design of the study, confounding by other lifestyle behaviors, and confounding by other kinds of physical activity. Walking has the potential to have a large public health impact due to its accessibility, its documented health benefits, and the fact that effective programs to promote walking already exist.

Walking is a simple health behavior that can reduce rates of chronic disease and ameliorate rising health care costs, with only a modest increase in the number of activities.

To burn even more calories, Healthline mentions running and walking up hills, which can increase your cardio activity and speed up weight loss.

Furthermore, although running burned significantly more calories, it only burned around 23 more calories per mile, on average, meaning both forms of exercise contributed significantly to the number of calories burned.

To increase the intensity of your walk and burn even more calories, try walking on routes with hills or slight inclines.

Another study from 2002 that backs the positive effects of burning more calories by walking up hills is J Appl Physiol (1985). The study goes on to say that you burn more fat by walking up hills. They found that you burn more calories walking up hills and since you’re burning more calories that could lead to losing more weight. Since your body becomes a fat burning machine after it reaches ketosis (where it burns fat instead of glucose), this study confirms that you’re receiving tons of added benefits from exercise!

The physiological and metabolic demands of hill walking have not been studied systematically in the field despite the potentially deleterious physiological consequences of activity sustained over an entire day. On separate occasions, 13 subjects completed a self-paced hill walk over 12 km, consisting of a range of gradients and terrain typical of a mountainous walk.

The major source of energy was an enhanced fat oxidation, probably from adipose tissue lipolysis reflected in high plasma nonesterified fatty acid concentrations. The major observations were the varying thermoregulatory responses and the negative energy balance incurred during the hill walk. It is concluded that recreational hill walking can constitute a significant metabolic and thermoregulatory strain on participants.

Reader’s Digest elaborates on how a body continues to burn calories after a workout, which means the body continues to burn more fat! They also mention HIIT as an effective way to get fit and lose more weight. Keto experts recommend HIIT since you are using short bursts of energy, which can be very effective on Keto.

After an intense workout, your body needs to recover from the oxygen it lost, which is why you don’t stop panting as soon as you step foot off the treadmill. That recovery process lasts for hours, so your metabolism stays kicked into gear even hours after your breath is back to normal. With a higher metabolism, you can burn through those fat calories quicker than ever. Studies have even pegged exactly how many minutes you need to work out to burn fat all day.

The thing is, you wouldn’t get that boost from a leisurely stroll. “If you walk at a snails pace for an hour, your body can keep up with it,” says Singer. When your body doesn’t need to recover, it doesn’t need to pump up its metabolism either.

For an effective weight-loss program, try high intensity interval training (HIIT), suggests Singer. You’ll give some form of cardio—whether running, dancing, or jumping rope—your all for 30 seconds, then recover for a minute and a half. Putting your body through that recovery period actually helps you blast more calories.

Moving at a good pace while you walk really is the way to go, according to Art Weltman, Ph.D. on Health:

In studies, Weltman has found that women who do three short (about 30-minute) high-intensity walks plus two moderately paced recovery walks a week lose up to six times more abdominal fat than participants who simply stroll five days a week. (This despite the fact that both groups burn the exact same number of calories.)

The power walkers also drop about four times as much total body fat. “There is a strong relationship between intensity of exercise and fat-burning hormones,” says Weltman. “So if you're exercising at a pace considered to be hard, you're likely to release more of these hormones.” The best part: When women walk, deep abdominal fat is the first to go. That's a scientific fact we can get excited about.

At the time of writing this post, we're currently giving away free copies of the Body Reboot book because it's our mission to increase awareness and to help people lose weight and get healthy! If you help us cover the cost of shipping, we’ll send a copy to your door FREE. Go over to this page to see if there are any copies left. At the time of writing this post, we're currently giving away free copies of the Body Reboot book because it's our mission to increase awareness and to help people lose weight and get healthy! If you help us cover the cost of shipping, we’ll send a copy to your door FREE. Go over to this page to see if there are any copies left.

Sources: Healthline, NCBI: Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2008, NCBI: J Appl Physiol (1985). 2002, Reader’s Digest, Health, Perfect Keto