It may not be the trendiest style or the most sophisticated exercise equipment out there, but walk vests have the potential to help you lose weight quickly by intensifying every step you take.

Weighted vests have been around for a while and they’re a great way to add resistance to your workout. Take a look at this video from YouTube that demonstrates some of the exercises you can try besides walking:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esyHglTYpdE[/youtube]

The official walk vest web site highlights these bullet points, which essentially are all enhanced benefits of an already worthwhile activity: walking.

- Burn excess calories
- Add muscle, lose fat
- Condition core/ strengthen abdominals
- Build bone density

Additionally a walk vest enables you to go anywhere and keeps your hands free. Individual weights slide in and out of sleeves sewn onto the walk vest and enable you to customize the amount resistance.

Here’s some information from walkvest.com on the amount of calories you can burn.

On the average, walking alone burns anywhere from 3 to 8 calories per minute – roughly 200-500 calories per hour. Walking in the weighted WALKVEST . . . increases the amount of calories burned – up to triple the amount. In our studies, individuals who walked on a treadmill for 45 minutes without the WALKVEST . . . burned from 150 to 230 calories. Those same individuals walked on the same treadmill while wearing the WALKVEST with 4 to 6lbs. and they burned 250-330 calories in 45 minutes.

Walkvest.com sells its vests for about $50 (though most of the marketing is targeted to women), eBay has lots of options starting at about $40.

Related:

Entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 6:37 pm under Health, Opinion.

Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
Stumble It!