I tried Japanese walking for a month and it improved my heart rate

Following yet another Christmas of excessive indulgence, I entered January determined to resume some form of fitness routine. However, having barely touched my trainers, never mind visited a gym, for the majority of 2025, it seemed like a daunting challenge.

During the bleak days of Covid lockdown in 2020, one of the few silver linings for me was achieving the best physical condition of my life by simply utilising that single hour we were permitted outdoors each day (remember that?) to begin running. I started from scratch, using intervals of running and walking, and within twelve months I found myself completing 10k runs effortlessly.

Regrettably, when we were all released back into society, fitness became secondary as I compensated for lost time with dining out and drinking instead.

Fast forward to January 2026 and even climbing the stairs has been leaving me considerably breathless – so the prospect of beginning any fitness programme filled me with apprehension. That’s when I recalled reading about “Japanese walking” as a technique to rapidly enhance your fitness.

It’s a straightforward concept to grasp and completely free, so I thought what better moment to attempt it than a cold, dreary and cash-strapped January?

If you’ve not encountered it previously, the principle of Japanese walking is interval walking. You aim to walk for 30 minutes, and during that period you alternate between 3 minutes of slow walking, with 3 minutes of fast walking.

For the best outcome, it’s recommended to undertake the 30-minute walk four to five times a week.

The beauty of this approach is that the definition of “slow” and “fast” is entirely dependent on your personal fitness level. Therefore, you have complete control over the pace you’re comfortable with and what you deem as “fast”.

The objective for the “fast” minutes is to walk at a speed brisk enough that holding a conversation becomes challenging. Conversely, during the “slow” minutes, you should reduce your pace significantly to recover your breath for the next round.

There’s no specific step target; your goal is simply to alternate between three minutes fast and three minutes slow for a total of 30 minutes. This means there’s no need for any special equipment like a fitness tracker unless you want one – you can monitor the intervals using your watch or mobile phone.

All you require is a pair of comfy shoes to get started.

However, for the sake of this experiment, I did utilise my fitness tracker to monitor its impact on my health. It provided an accurate representation of the effects on my resting heart rate, with a lower resting heart rate signifying improved cardiac health.

The tracker also calculated the distance I covered during each walk – another straightforward method to observe how my fitness progressed over the month.

The technique is known as Japanese walking, as it was initially studied by researchers at Shinshu University in Japan. They discovered it was an excellent approach for participants to enhance their cardiovascular health, building endurance through a low-impact method.

Remarkably, it’s claimed to be a more effective overall way to boost fitness than setting a daily step goal, such as the 10,000 steps that many people now aim for.

Last year, I attempted the 10,000 steps daily challenge, and whilst I noticed improvements in my fitness levels, I struggled to find the time each day to consistently reach that step count, as it was taking me an hour or longer to walk that distance.

Therefore, if this approach, requiring a commitment of four days weekly and just 30 minutes, could deliver similar results, it seemed ideal to me. As a 48 year old mother of two children, incorporating any form of exercise into my routine can sometimes feel like a balancing act, but here’s how I managed throughout January.

Week one

Having had my share of Christmas excess, on New Year’s Eve I began my plan for Japanese walking for the month. Setting off, I’ll admit initially the rapid walking left me quite breathless, but the three-minute slow walking recovery periods helped me push through.

Understanding it was only three minutes of rapid walking at a time made completing the full 30 minutes far more manageable, rather than contemplating maintaining brisk walking for a prolonged duration. I began by simply strolling around nearby housing estates, discovering fresh routes and roads that I hadn’t explored for years, which allowed me to have a good look around my local neighbourhood as well.

During that initial week I was clocking up roughly 3,000 steps per walk, with an average pace according to my tracker of a fairly leisurely 17 minutes per kilometre.

Throughout this opening week I was still polishing off the remainder of the Christmas chocolates and cheese though. So despite all the walking in the world I knew the scales wouldn’t bring good news, and sure enough, I shed nothing.

Resting heart rate: 75 bpm.

Average speed: 17m07 per km.

Week two

Brilliant, and then the snow arrived. This is the single drawback of selecting walking for fitness – the unpredictable British weather.

Attempting to stay on course, I did try to head out on the first properly snowy day that we experienced – but the snow was simply too thick to achieve any sort of “brisk walk”. However, I still made the effort to trudge about for half an hour which I believe worked my muscles regardless just attempting to remain upright.

Fortunately, the snow completely melted within two days, so I was able to return outdoors to tackle the pavements with the interval walking. And I could begin to notice a genuine difference already.

This quickly registered on the fitness tracker, as my resting heart rate dropped by the conclusion of week two, and it demonstrated that I was burning more calories as well. I appeared to have substantially increased my pace since the opening week – the tracker indicating I was now at an average of 13 minutes per kilometre.

This week I also began addressing my nutrition in an effort to lose weight alongside improving my fitness levels. I’ve been following the revamped Slimming World programme (which I’ll be discussing in greater detail in an upcoming piece), and getting back into the routine of it resulted in a substantial weight loss of 6lbs this week, which really motivated me to keep up with the fitness aspect as well.

Resting heart rate: 70 bpm.

Average speed: 13m 39 per km.

Week three

I’d really found my rhythm this week, and regardless of the weather conditions, I was throwing on my thick padded coat and heading to my local park and footpaths to relish feeling more invigorated. I began to genuinely anticipate the three-minute fast intervals, and the sensation of my circulation responding.

Eager to incorporate walks whenever possible, I encouraged friends to join me, in between coffee shop visits which made it more enjoyable and sociable too. It felt as though this had become a habit that simply slotted into my everyday life – and I believe that’s ultimately the most effective type of exercise.

It inspired me to explore other nearby parks and nature reserves to provide myself with a different environment and appreciate the outdoors.

The tracker revealed I was consistently improving my pace too – again without feeling I was doing anything differently as I was simply moving as quickly as I could during those three-minute bursts.

Resting heart rate: 65 bpm.

Average speed: 13m 04 per km.

Week four

By this week, I was well into the swing of the walking routine and began to merge the 30-minute sessions with the morning school run. Completing the session early left me feeling invigorated for the day’s work ahead.

By the end of this week, I was able to review my fitness tracker to see the overall fitness improvements from week one through to week four.

The most significant change was my resting heart rate, which had dropped by more than ten points from the start of January when it was 75bpm, to 62 bpm by the end of January. I genuinely felt much fitter – climbing stairs no longer left me absurdly breathless.

On the start date, I covered 3,000 steps in the 30 minutes, but by the end, I was closer to 4,000 steps in the same time. And the average speed indicated that over that 30 minute period, I was clearly walking much faster overall – covering a km in an average of 12 minutes in the final week as opposed to 17 minutes at the very beginning.

If you’re looking at the average speed thinking “that’s ridiculously slow”, bear in mind this is averaging both the fast walks and the slow intervals across the full 30 minutes.

Interestingly, I noticed that on the four days each week when I completed the 30-minute session, I often reached or exceeded 10,000 steps without even consciously trying. I also observed a consistent improvement in my overall walking speed, despite each session involving essentially the same routine – walking as briskly as possible for three minutes, followed by a slower pace for three minutes.

Resting heart rate: 62 bpm.

Average speed: 12m 48 per km.

The verdict

As we approach 2026 and I embark on my fitness journey, I’ve found the Japanese walking method to be an almost ideal way to reintroduce exercise into my routine. By the end of the month, I could see tangible improvements in my cardiovascular fitness, with my resting heart rate decreasing by ten points, and feeling stronger and quicker with each walk I undertook.

The faster intervals during each walk were becoming so rapid that I felt ready to transition into a jog, which will be the next phase in my fitness journey as I begin to incorporate slow jogs. The statistics, in terms of the increase in my walking speed and the decrease in my resting heart rate, were remarkable over just one month.

However, as my results from the first week clearly demonstrate, walking alone was insufficient for weight loss. And as many experienced trainers will advise, it’s impossible to outrun (or outwalk) a poor diet.

However, once I began addressing my diet in the second week, I noticed that regular walking was also aiding me in maintaining my weight loss objectives, with a total of 10lbs shed over the month. To clarify, the walking enhanced my fitness levels, while consuming a healthy, nutritious diet facilitated my weight loss – I’m currently losing an average of 2lb per week, a trend I’ve carried into February.

As a fitness strategy, Japanese walking is incredibly straightforward to follow, and since it’s based on your own abilities, there’s no pressure to reach a specific goal.

It’s gentle on your joints and inexpensive – in fact, it’s virtually free unless you decide to purchase a fitness tracker. And as it only requires 30 minutes four times a week, it seemed much more manageable to incorporate into my daily routine than striving for a 10,000 steps target.

I would wholeheartedly recommend giving it a go if, like me, you’re looking to gradually reintroduce a gentle fitness regimen into your life.