Getting back to walking

To improve fitness, I'm always going to argue for picking activities you personally find fun, or at minimum tolerable and practical. Exercise we like so do regularly is 100% more beneficial than something that makes us miserable, so we procrastinate it, skip it with the slightest excuse, and probably eventually give it up entirely.

After making those choices, it's a matter of starting with a dosage that's manageably challenging. As fitness improves, that will begin to feel easy. When the easiness sets in, that's the time to increase duration, frequency or intensity of the exercise, or adopt new forms of exercise, to keep the manageable challenge always in the picture.

Ideally, there's a strength challenge and a cardiovascular challenge in the mix, but if starting very physically depleted, it's fine to start with one and add the other later.

Over-exercise is counter-productive for either of fitness improvement or weight loss. It's counter-productive for fitness improvement because exercise breaks down muscle and stresses the body in other ways; recovery is when the body builds back better than before. Over-exercising shortchanges recovery, limits progress. Overdoing is counter-productive for weight loss because it causes persistent fatigue, makes us drag through the rest of the day. Because of that, we rest more, burn fewer calories doing daily life stuff, thus effectively wiping out some of the exercise calorie benefits. On top of that, overdoing creates more injury risk, and injury causes setbacks.

The right mix feels like that manageable challenge, but leaves a person feeling more energized than exhausted (after maybe a few minutes of "whew" right after the workout). The "manageable" part avoids the overdoing; the "challenge" part creates the progress.

Exactly what that is will differ for each person. For sure, if someone tells you to do pedal to the metal high intensity workouts right out of the gate, I think that's bad advice. Manageable challenge, building more activity/intensity in as fitness improves, is a better route IMO.

I don't think there are hacks or tricks. Patient persistence is more the thing needed, non-magical though that sounds. I think if you work at it regularly and gradually improve, you'll surprise yourself with your progress when you look back in a few weeks, even more in a few months, and gee whiz amaze yourself in a small number of years. That was my experience, anyway.

Best wishes.