The signs of over walking are persistent fatigue, heavy limbs, muscle soreness, joint pain, mood changes like depression, anxiety and irritability as well as sleep issues like insomnia, waking tired and decreased performance, frequent minor illness, like colds and even a lack of motivation, which signals your body needs more rest and recovery time.
Heavy legs is a feeling like your legs are unusually heavy or weak.
Experiencing intense, lingering muscle aches, stiffness or pain during or after walks and not just mild soreness and even having an inability to walk as far or as fast as before or needing longer recovery and even having difficulty concentrating can be signs of over walking.
It's also better to walk both fast and longer for optimal health.
Walking faster is also strongly linked more to reduced mortality risk and more improved health and longer walks also build your endurance and can also be more sustainable.
The ideal approach to walking for health benefits is to actually combine both walking faster for a portion of your walk and then continue walking for a longer distance.
The more you walk, the healthier you can become and you can also lose weight by walking longer and even faster and can help to maintain a healthy weight.
Walking a faster pace is associated with a lower risk of death from all causes, especially from cardiovascular disease as it helps keep your heart healthy and helps improve blood flow.
Brisk walking and walking fast also improves your heart's efficiency and increases oxygen delivery to your heart and the rest of your body and helps to reduce cardiovascular issues.
For older adults, increasing your walking speed and walking as fast as you can, can also lead to substantial improves in your overall ability to walk longer distances.
Longer walks also help to build up your overall endurance over time.
And slower, longer walks also put less strain on your body, when compared to fast walking, which can also potentially lower your risk of injury.
Longer walks can also be good as they can also provide you more time for a mental time out and can also improve your emotional well being.
To combine both walking fast and longer walks, start out with a brisk walking pace to get your heart rate up, as this also provides the most significant health benefits.
Then add longer distance at a moderate pace.
After the fast paced portion of your walk, continue walking for longer distances at a slower or even more moderate pace to meet your step goals and help build your endurance.