Benefits

Walking is good for your heart and lungs, improving cardiovascular fitness.

You can get major health benefits from relatively mild exercise, as long as you do enough and do it regularly.

Regular walking can reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis.

Walking will increase your muscle tone and increase the efficiency of your heart and lungs. It will help reduce cholesterol, boost metabolism, and improve the health of bones. Ease stress, raise your energy levels and improve sleep. Combined this can also help you reduce body fat and lose weight.

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Links to Complementary Websites


Walking the way to Health (WHI) is the largest national body promoting and setting the standards for lWalking the way to Health (WHI)ed health walks. It is a joint initiative between Natural England and the British Heart Foundation.
WHI aims to encourage people, particularly those who take little exercise, to do regular short walks in their communities. They support over 525 local health walk schemes. Please click here to visit their website, where you can use the Walkfinder to locate a Health Walking scheme in other areas..

Dr William Bird, a GP at the Sonning Common Health Centre, initiated the Health Walks scheme. ThSonning Common Health Centree Health Centre states "While we inevitably spend much of our time dealing with illness, we lay great stress on prevention and on improving your health. We aim to help to develop a healthy community and have fostered the development of easily accessible exercise schemes such as Health Walks, HealthCycling and the Green Gym. These initiatives have won a national reputation."
Please cliGoring Gap Health Walksck here to learn more about the practice.

Goring Gap Health Walks is another long established health walking scheme, based in Goring (ten miles north-west of Reading). All year they offer four walks / week, with an additional three walks / week during the summer. Check out their website here.

The Get Oxfordshire Active (GO Active) project aims to get adults aged over 16 doing moderate exercise for 30 minutes at least three times a week.  At present only 23.2% of adults in the county achieve this amount of exercise. This is a three year project which will have £1.4 million pounds invested in it. Please see here for more details.

Greys Green Golf Course is a public, pay and play golf course in Rotherfield Peppard, and kindly make their course available for Health Walks. They provide the cheapest golf in the Henley and Reading area, and are open every day of the year, inc all Bank Holidays. There are no tee booking times, you pay for the day, not per round. They are located on the B481, Reading to Nettlebed road, between Sonning Common and Highmoor, at the end of Dog Lane in Peppard, next to the Dog pub, and opposite the Red Lion pub. Please see here for more details.

For more information about what is going on in the local parishes please see the Sonning Common Parish Council website.