You Can Burn 500 Calories While Walking — Here's How

When you think of the best types of exercises for your health, high-impact activities like running or high-intensity interval training (HIIT) might come to mind. But you don't need to go all out to improve your fitness or burn serious calories. All you need to do is put on your sneakers and go for a walk.

Walking offers a ton of physical benefits — like maintaining a healthy body weight, improving your overall heart health and fitness and strengthening your muscles and bones — according to the Mayo Clinic. (Not to mention the many mental health advantages, like easing stress and anxiety, for instance.)

Plus, walking can help you meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) recommendation of getting 150 to 300 minutes of cardiovascular exercise each week to maximize your overall health.

If you're looking to pay attention to the number of calories you burn during exercise, you can burn 500 calories with this activity. Ahead, we offer tips on how to burn 500 calories walking if that's your goal, plus a sample workout.

While how many calories you've burned is based on variables including your age, body weight, exercise intensity and exercise duration, you can use a formula to calculate your energy expenditure during your walking workout, according to the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM).

This formula involves using METs (metabolic equivalents of a task), which estimate the amount of energy you use during exercise compared to your resting metabolism. You can use this list compiled by the NASM, which tells you your amount of METs depending on your walking speed.

‌The formula:‌ Exercise duration (in minutes) x (METs x 3.5 x weight in kg)/200) = total calories burned

If this seems like a lot of work (we totally understand!), there are many free online tools, like this physical activity calorie counter from the American Council on Exercise (ACE), that can help you figure out the number of calories you burned during a specific activity, like walking.

Additionally, smartwatches, fitness trackers and heart rate monitors can give you an estimate based on your heart rate during your workout.

As we mentioned above, the number of calories you burn walking (or doing any other activity, for that matter) depends on a few factors, including body weight and walking speed. As a general rule, a person who weighs more will burn more calories during the same workout as someone who weighs less because it requires more energy for a heavier body to function versus a lighter one, according to the Mayo Clinic.

How far you'd walk to burn 500 calories in terms of steps or miles will vary from person to person. See below for a breakdown of how much walking you need to do to burn 500 calories, according to Harvard Health Publishing.

If you weigh 125 pounds, here's how long you need to walk to burn 500 calories: You'd need to walk at a pace of 4 miles per hour for about 111 minutes. You could also burn 500 calories walking at a pace of 3.5 miles per hour for 125 minutes.

If you weigh 155 pounds, you'd burn 500 calories walking 4 miles per hour for 90 minutes, or walking at a pace of 3.5 miles per hour for about 100 minutes. Boosting your walking speed up to 4.5 miles per hour means you'll expend 500 calories in just 81 minutes.

If you weigh 185 pounds, you'd burn 500 calories in 75 minutes walking at a pace of 4 miles per hour, and expend the same number of calories walking 3.5 miles per hour for about 85 minutes.

You can do the following workout on a treadmill if you have access to one at home or at a gym. If you don't have a treadmill, you can do this outside as well. A running watch or another activity tracker may come in handy to track your speed.

• Start with a warmup of 5 minutes at 2 mph at a 0 incline setting to get blood flowing to your muscles and let your heart rate rise gradually.
• After you feel you are warmed up, increase your speed or raise the incline of your treadmill a few degrees to create a pace that challenges you, but won't fatigue you.
• Experiment with 1 minute of brisk walking, light jogging or a higher incline followed by 5 minutes or more of relaxed walking.
• Finish your workout by decreasing your speed by 0.5 mph and incline by one degree each minute until your heart rate is close to normal.

If you're wondering how to burn the most calories on a treadmill and want to make this workout harder, you can walk faster (or run) and increase the amount of time you're upping your speed and incline for.