Running and walking are some of the easiest and best activities to participate in for fitness. Almost anybody can do these activities, and one of the best things about giving it a try for the first time is that not much equipment is needed. A good pair of walking or running shoes is about the only equipment to buy if you want to have a comfortable beginning. Later in the program you might try for some exercise clothes that allow comfort in moving without any restrictions in the legs or arms.
While the objective in walking or running, or any exercise, is fitness and improved health it can also be used for other benefits. Increased strength in the muscles of the body and even cardiorespiratory benefits to improve mobility and breathing. Exercise in general burns calories and that is a good method of losing weight.
A problem that often occurs is when individuals try to use outside equipment to think they can improve these simple exercises and achieve faster and better benefits. The one that comes to mind that I still see is the wearing of heavy or nylon clothes to increase the amount of sweat generated for added weight loss. There is a consequence to increasing sweating with extra clothing. The reason a person sweats is that the energy used by the muscles generates heat and body temperature and sweating helps release this buildup of heat. When the sweat is covered by extra clothes the evaporation of the sweat that cools the body is prevented. Now the core temperature of the body increases and performance is affected. The easiest analogy is to think how well a person can perform any exercise when they have a temperature from illness or inflammation. The other side effect is the loss of water from sweating. Think again how a person is affected when they become dehydrated. When a person becomes dehydrated, performance deteriorates. And poor performance in ventures other than exercise can be witnessed in jobs that require physical labor when a person becomes dehydrated. If dehydration becomes too great, health is affected. One of the best examples I use is for athletes that have to make weight for an event. Wrestlers, boxers, and jockeys, are examples. Having coached wrestling for many years I have seen the results of wrestlers losing too much body fluid from sweating and end up having a very poor performance on the mat or even end up in a hospital. I used to tell my wrestlers to take the sweat jackets off and keep wrestling to burn off those last few calories. This way they improved their wrestling skills, got more conditioning, and still lost weight. When I taught at West Point they banned the use of sweat clothes to lose weight when too many cadets ended up in the infirmary from trying to lose weight and became severely dehydrated.
