Fitness trainer Paul Revelia makes a case for walking after doing it for an hour every day for 30 days

A while back, I wrote that staying active outside your regular workouts can go a long way towards your body transformation goals, namely burning fat. While it’s easy to advise greater activity on paper, sometimes it’s hard to get motivated by the theoretical aspect—meaning it’s hard to stay on track of your fitness goals if you can’t visualize what the results might be like.

Enter fitness trainer and physique athlete Paul Revelia.

In a recent video Revelia posted on his YouTube channel, he details an experiment he tried: What would happen if you just added an hour of walking to your normal routine every day, for 30 days? You wouldn’t have to change a thing; no strict diets, no tracking calories, no adjustments to your workout plan and routine. Just add walking, the simplest and lightest exercise movement an able-bodied person can do.

Of course, if you’re at all familiar with the basic science, you would know the answer is that you would lose fat. But just how much fat can you lose with this simple addition?

For Revelia, an hour every day for a month on an incline treadmill amounted to a loss of around 12 lbs. of body fat. That might not seem like a lot on paper but that’s a considerable difference. What more if you kept going for another month or maybe more?

You can start by walking for as long as you can. If you can walk outside for an hour, that’s great. If you can do that every day, that’s even better

So how can you apply this to your own fitness journey? First, if you’re a bit daunted by what Revelia did, know that you don’t have to walk 60 minutes every day at the beginning, and you certainly don’t always have to get on an incline treadmill, especially if you don’t have access to a gym. You can start by walking for as long as you can. If you can walk outside for an hour, that’s great. If you can do that every day, that’s even better.

But if you’re already someone who’s active, don’t forget that you do need to be doing this on top of your already-existing exercise routine. You can certainly do the walking without doing anything else, but the results Revelia got are largely because he added the extra calorie burn (one hour of steady walking is around 450 calories) on top of his usual lifting (which would be around 200 to 300 calories in a one-hour session). That’s a total of at least around 750 extra calories burned on a workout day.

And speaking of calories, the fact that Revelia didn’t change anything about his diet or tracked his intake does not mean you get to overdo it. You would still need to eat in a way that doesn’t negate the added calorie burn you get from walking an hour every day; while it can be a little loose and flexible, you should avoid derailing yourself with extended calorie surpluses. And if you’re maintaining a physique, you shouldn’t forget to consume the daily amount of protein you need to keep your muscles from shrinking.

Lastly, even if you’re not chasing a fitness goal, walking regularly, especially outside the house, boosts your mental health. Staying indoors and walking without a real direction on a treadmill can be mind-numbing.

So if your New Year’s resolution is to get started towards being fit, going for a walk is a nice place to begin. If the weather’s nice (and it certainly is right now), hit the pavement and get your daily dose of dopamine and endorphins. You can thank Revelia in a month.