6 Tips for Indoor Walking

Employers are providing more opportunities for indoor walking. Increasing physical activity means healthier workers. A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc., financial consultants, has a 1/3-mile track inside the firm's corporate headquarters in St. Louis that's available to all employees—24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Fitness centers and gyms have treadmills and sometimes tracks for indoor walking. These places usually offer televisions to watch or music to listen to while you walk, but membership fees can be costly and the hours of operation might not match your schedule.

You may find there's simply no place like home for easy, comfortable, inexpensive and time-saving exercise. "If you have a large house, you can get a lot of walking going from room to room. [In smaller houses and apartments] you can also march in place while watching TV," says James O. Hill, PhD, obesity researcher at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, and co-founder and chair of America on the Move, a national program that helps people and communities achieve healthy changes.

To make your in-home walks interesting and fun, check the library, video store or online for walking DVDs and tapes. When you pop these in, you get pace-setting music, advice on technique and timed walk routines with a variety of movements. Walking in your house is free, but you can also buy a home treadmill machine for about $500 and up.

Marching the mall

If you can resist the smell of warm cinnamon buns wafting through the air, you might enjoy mall walking. Many enclosed shopping centers open early just for walkers and some stay open a bit later for the same reason.

"We have walkers all day long, all times of the year," says Betsy Lackey, general manager of the Adrian Mall in Adrian, MI. She describes the regulars as ranging from "people with baby carriages to the very elderly." Two loops around the mall equals one mile, she adds.

Malls attract walkers because the centers are temperature-controlled and have smooth floors, filtered air, security, bathrooms, easy parking and—yes—a place to get coffee or a snack afterwards. Those amenities might explain why research shows that, compared to men, women walk faster in mall settings than on traditional tracks. Some malls have organized walking clubs, although many mall walkers form their own social networks without the management's help.

Tips on indoor walking