When I started walking consistently, I was not walking every day.

Not even close.

In the beginning, it was normally one or two walks per week.

Today, my overall activity level is much higher. I aim for around four to six physical activities per week, usually including at least one gym session, one swim and then a mix of walking, cycling, TRX or something similar.

That change did not happen because I suddenly decided I needed to exercise six times a week.

It happened gradually.

For me, that is probably the most important lesson:

frequency should grow with your fitness and your routine, not ahead of them.

I would not tell a beginner to walk every day

If somebody heavier and relatively inactive asked me:

Should I start walking every day?

My instinctive answer would be no.

Not because daily walking is necessarily bad.

It is because starting with a target that is too ambitious makes it much easier to fail.

If I had told myself in January that I needed three proper walks every week, I might have given up.

One or two was realistic.

That made it repeatable.

And repeatable mattered much more than impressive.

Even one short walk is a start

I do not think everybody needs the same starting point.

For one person, three walks per week might be easy.

For somebody else, even one 15-minute walk may be a meaningful first step.

I would rather set a target that feels almost too easy and actually keep doing it than create an ambitious weekly programme that lasts two weeks.

At the beginning, I think consistency is more important than frequency.

If you are still trying to work out what a realistic first session looks like, I have a separate guide on how long a heavy person should walk when starting out.

My goal now is four to six activities per week

Today, I think about my week differently.

I do not have a target of four walks or five walks.

My target is roughly four to six physical activities.

A normal week might include:

• one gym session
• one swimming session
• two or three power walks
• cycling
• TRX at home
• occasionally something lighter

The exact mix changes.

That does not bother me.

I care much more about maintaining the overall rhythm.

Walking is my easiest activity to fit in

Gym currently means training with my trainer.

Swimming takes more time because I need to travel there, change, swim, shower and get back.

Walking is much simpler.

If I have 45 minutes available, I can put my shoes on and go.

That means walking often fills the gaps when gym or swimming does not fit.

When I work from home, I particularly like going out in the morning or during lunch.

I get some movement.

I get outside.

And I can listen to a podcast at the same time.

It fits easily into the working day.

Work and family are my biggest blockers

My rest days are rarely planned recovery days.

Usually they happen because life gets in the way.

Work.

Family.

Travel.

Some weeks simply have less space.

That is another reason I do not like rigid exercise schedules.

If the plan says five sessions and work destroys two of them, I do not want the week to suddenly feel like a failure.

I would rather look at what movement I managed to get.

Not every activity needs to be a full training session

Last week I was travelling.

That obviously changed the routine.

Some of my movement came from walking through airports, walking to gates and walking around London.

I would not necessarily call all of that a proper power-walking session.

But it is still movement.

For me, there is a difference between:

formal training and being physically active.

Both matter.

The goal is not to create an accounting system where every step has to qualify as exercise.

My normal walk is around 40–45 minutes

Today, 40–45 minutes is probably my ideal regular walking session.

It fits into the day.

It is long enough to feel like proper training.

And I can normally maintain a good pace throughout.

Sometimes I do something shorter, around 30–35 minutes.

And when I have time at the weekend, I try to get in a longer session of an hour or more.

That mix works better for me than trying to make every walk identical.

I have also written separately about how I think about 3 km, 5 km and 10 km as walking distances, because for me time and distance serve slightly different purposes.

I can now walk on consecutive days

Earlier in the year, recovery was more noticeable.

Especially when I started going to the gym.

I could feel the muscle soreness after harder sessions — often not the next day, but two days later.

At that stage, my body clearly needed more time to adapt.

Today, it is different.

I can do gym one day and walk the next without really thinking about it.

I can also walk on consecutive days.

I do not normally feel that I need a specific recovery day from walking anymore.

My body seems much more accustomed to the overall rhythm now.

I still walk normally after gym

If I have had a hard gym session, I would probably avoid going for a run the next day.

But I am quite happy to walk normally.

I do not deliberately cut a 45-minute walk down to 15 minutes just because I trained the day before.

That was not necessarily true earlier in the year.

Again, the difference is adaptation.

What my body handles comfortably now is not necessarily what it handled comfortably when I started.

Different activities give me different things

I could probably make walking my main activity and be happy with that.

But I like having some variation.

Walking is mainly about movement, stamina and cardiovascular fitness for me.

Swimming and gym give me more work for the rest of the body, especially the upper body.

I have also started experimenting with Nordic walking using bungee-style poles, which adds another variation.

I do not think variety is mandatory.

But it keeps things more interesting and gives me different types of physical work.

Bad weather does not automatically cancel the walk

I live somewhere where waiting for perfect weather is not really an option.

So yes, I walk when the weather is bad.

Rain may change the route or the pace.

Slippery conditions may make me more careful.

But normal bad weather does not mean I automatically stay inside.

Again, consistency matters more to me than making every session ideal.

Do family walks count?

This one is harder.

Of course they count as movement.

But I do not always count them as one of my proper physical activities.

A slow walk with children can include a lot of stopping, waiting and changing direction.

For example, one Saturday I was out walking with the family, but I still went for a power walk later in the evening because I wanted a proper training session.

On another day, a family visit to the swimming pool may be the only activity I have time for.

I might only swim a few lengths.

That is fine too.

Not every day needs to be optimised.

I would increase frequency gradually

If I were starting again, I would not focus on hitting a particular number of walks per week.

I would start with something I knew I could repeat.

Maybe that is one walk.

Maybe two.

Maybe three.

Then I would see how the body reacts.

Does the stiffness improve?

Does recovery get easier?

Does a 30-minute walk start feeling normal?

Once that happens, adding another session becomes much easier.

That feels more sensible to me than starting with a target based on what somebody else says a weekly routine should look like.

Pace can come later

I also would not make pace the first priority.

At the beginning, I think the more useful target is simply being able to walk regularly and comfortably.

Once that feels normal, pace becomes a much more useful progress measure.

For me, that eventually became one of my favourite metrics.

I wrote separately about how fast a beginner should walk and how I use pace as a target once basic consistency is already there.

Listen to what your body is telling you

I never really had a moment where I increased walking frequency too quickly and regretted it.

Partly because I increased it gradually.

If I felt tired or sore, I did less.

If I felt good, I did more.

Today, I rarely need to think about recovery from walking.

Earlier in the year, I did.

That is a useful reminder that the right frequency can change quite a lot as fitness improves.

Final thoughts

I started with roughly one or two walks per week.

Today, I aim for four to six physical activities per week, with walking making up a significant part of that.

But I would not have started with today’s routine.

It would have been too much.

The progression came from building a habit first and adding more activity when it became normal.

For a beginner, I would not worry too much about whether the perfect answer is two walks, three walks or five.

Find a frequency you can actually repeat.

Then build from there.