Challenging your body by gently pushing yourself out of your comfort level is very important to continue to wrack up the health benefits. Repeatedly doing the same workout over and over no longer challenges your body and the benefits stagnate.
What's needed? Great question! Change is critical!
It's important to gently push yourself to go a little faster. Intervals are a great way to do that. Intervals are perfect for walkers and runners alike. Intervals can be based on a set time such as walking or running more quickly for 30 seconds and more slowly for 5 minutes to begin and then slowly increasing the amount of time you do the quicker pace while either shortening or maintaining the slower pace.
Time is just one way to use intervals. One can make up intervals based on distance as well by going to "that tree" at a faster pace and then going more slowly to the next mileage marker. Just as you would do for the time intervals, you slowly add distance to your quicker pace interval and shorten the distance for your slower pace.
Either way, gentle transitions between paces is important to protect your knees - stopping and starting suddenly isn't a good idea.
There is one other "interval" of sorts that is a little harder to come by given our local geography but it's not impossible. Finding a hilly path (or using the incline on the treadmill works too). Walk/run a path once every 2-3 weeks that is somewhat hilly. At first, pick one or two hills to tackle. As you build up endurance and physical capacity, tackle a few more hills and work up to do the route every other week.
Get out of your rut by challenging yourself.
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