Yes, walking can build your leg muscles
No matter what happens to me, my athletic career, or my fitness journey, I’ll always sing the praises of walking. I’m lazy as hell when I’m not motivated, so the easiest way to fire up the neurons and spark the calorie burn on an otherwise sedentary day is to put on my slides and get up and go.
For those looking to up their physical activity and burn more calories to lose some weight, I’m practically preaching to the choir. If there is nothing else, there is always walking. But for those who have more advanced fitness and aesthetic goals, you may wonder: How optimal and effective is putting one foot in front of the other in sculpting a physique, really?
The answer is while walking isn’t better than lifting weights, it can still shore up your muscle-building process.
First, a quick reminder of how muscle is built by the body. Exercise—any kind, so long as there is enough resistance—makes what we call microtears on the muscles that are worked, and the body uses protein to build them back up bigger and stronger. That’s hypertrophy.
And while it doesn’t look that way at first glance, walking can be enough to spark hypertrophy, especially in the lower body. (Of course, because those parts are what’s most activated by walking.) What’s even better is that it seems to better help elder adults, who are more prone to muscle loss as they age.
The science backs it up, as well: a Japanese study done in 2019 on senior citizens saw that a “progressive” walking program was able to increase the size of thigh muscles, while a similar study saw potentially better muscle quality in the thigh after a 10-week walking program.
The second study also showed that results in muscle quality improved with the addition of extra resistance training, which means that walking is much better hand-in-hand with other forms of exercise. It’s especially important to note as one gets older and strength and mobility may decrease.
What does this mean for lifters and athletes with other goals? For one, you may have to turn up the difficulty of your walking to make an impact on your leg aesthetics.
If you don’t like the pace and cardio demands of running, you can set a treadmill all the way up on an incline and just start walking. You’ll still get a physically taxing workout at your pace, as though you were hiking up a mountain—another study, this time from 2015, estimated that the energy the body burns goes up by 52 percent at a 5 percent incline, all the way up to 110 percent at a 10 percent incline.
This one I can sort of attest to, when it comes to muscle-sculpting: As a formerly skinny guy, I started incorporating incline walks of 30 minutes to a full hour after my workouts and got compliments on my calves, which had always been chicken-like. Subject your legs to enough training stimulus, and you can build that muscle at a relatively more relaxed pace.
So whether you’re a complete novice looking for a way to start, or an advanced lifter or athlete looking for a way to switch things up, take this as yet another great reason to put on your shoes, take your keys, get out the door, and just start walking. Of course, when and where it’s safe to do so, that is.
