Go For A Dang Walk

Seriously, put your phone away and go for a walk.  There is overwhelming research supporting improved health markers in many categories directly correlated to brisk walks multiple times per day, or step counting.  Get your dang steps in.  10,000 steps seems to be the number many people are shooting for.  Don’t get caught up in the number, the goal is simply to move more.  The goal is to walk more than you currently are, preferably daily.

I used to call my walks my Triple H walks.  Heart, Hip, and Head Health walks.

It turns out I need a longer acronym, I just wanted to play The Game.  Walking has been linked to improved cardiovascular health, digestive health, insulin sensitivity, mental health, fat loss, reduced stress, better hip/low back health, and decreased perception of pain. 

A brisk walk has been shown to improve heart health by improving circulation.  If our circulation is improved then our recovery will be better between sets, between workouts, while we are sleeping, and this process will feed forward on itself creating better gainz.  Remember that you need to recover before you adapt.  If your circulation and heart health improve to lower your HR 1bpm on average, that is 1440 less times your heart must work in a single day.  That is 525,600 less beats per year.  The compounding effect that might have on general recovery and fatigue from day to day cannot be understated. Not to mention that the increased blood flow and circulation will deliver more nutrients and oxygen to your muscles, decreasing perception of delayed onset muscle soreness, due to the promotion of recovery and healing.  Most importantly, you should also get a bigger arm pump if your circulation is improved. 

The locomotion of walking has been shown to help physically move the food in your gut, promoting smoother digestion, reduced gastrointestinal stress, and reduced indigestion.  If we can make it easier for our body to breakdown food into useable macronutrients sooner, our bodies will have more resources for repairing and building muscle, instead of using all our time to digest the sushi baby in our gut.  Walking post meal has been shown to be twice as effective as medication for lowering blood sugar.  This is due to the improvement in nutrient partitioning, when you walk your body moves the carbs that you are digesting and stores them as glycogen because your body just used some of the stored glycogen for walking.  A long-term benefit of all these 1% improvements should be the promotion of fat loss, leading to more muscle in your weight class, a bigger total, and a higher performance based on scoring (Dots/GL/Wilks).

A brisk of only 10 minutes in length has been shown to improve mood and reduce stress.  If walking can reduce stress and help us shift into a mental state of rest and digest this will also promote improved recovery.  Going outside and exercising has also been linked to improve mental health and reduced depression.  Just getting some sunlight in our eyes and some vitamin D will go a long way in improving how we feel from day to day. 

One of my favourite benefits of daily walking has been the improvement in hip and low back health.  The way you feel getting out of bed after a hard squat or deadlift day can be tough if you’ve been in the game awhile.  The locomotion of walking will actively stretch out our low back, hips, knees, and ankles.  We don’t walk too little; we sit too much.  Daily walking will also help reduce the negative impact of chronic sitting lifestyle that most of us take part in from day to day.  Improved hip and low back health, along with the decreased pain perception, should lead to greater performance in the gym. 

If walking can improve all the factors mentioned above, sleep will probably improve as well.  Creating a nice feed forward loop. 

So how much should we walk? How Far?  How many steps? 

If you live a sedentary lifestyle, long walks or step counting can seem daunting.  First things first you just need to build the habit of walking.  Just master getting outside and walking before worrying about hiking for 60 minutes+ or accumulating 10-15 thousand steps.  10 minutes is better than no minutes.  Next, you can either increase the distance and time that you are walking or add in 1 more walk to your day.  Again, keep the habit building manageable.  Adherence and consistency trumps everything else. 

Stan Efferding has popularized the post meal 10-minute walk.  He stole it from someone else, so I am stealing it from him. If you live the Bro life like me, you have been eating 4-6 meals per day for more than a decade.  If you went for a 10-minute walk after every meal that would be 40-60 minutes of walking per day.  Wikipedia says that the average walking pace is 5.1km/h.  The average number of steps in a kilometer ranges from 1300-1500.  So going for a 10-minute walk 4-6 times per would be somewhere between 4500-7500 of added steps per day.  A 10-minute walk is way easier to fit into a busy schedule.  It is also less daunting.  It should be easy to walk down the street for 5 minutes and walk back.  10 minutes of walking is also significantly less boring and daunting than 60 minutes on a treadmill, Stairmaster, or hamster wheel. 

Increased walking frequency seems to have better effect on weight loss when volume is matched.  Funny, research seems to support similar results for muscle growth.  Improved muscle growth with increased frequency when total weekly volume is matched. 

My personal application of my recommendations is to walk the dogs twice a day with my fiancé.  We usually walk for 30-40 minutes.  We have both influenced each other in this department.  I was always a first thing in the morning walker.  Rain or shine you go.  No excuses.  If you let yourself skip the walk you are just setting yourself up to be okay with skipping more walks in the future.  No fair-weather walkers here.  The dogs need to be good on the walk and earn their breakfast anyway.  It has backfired in a way, Bear won’t take a poo anywhere near the house, he needs to go for a walk first. If there are any true long-term benefits to daily fasted low intensity steady state exercise, then we are at least checking the box.  This also has the benefit of getting your eyes outside to view daylight first thing in the morning.  Helping with energy levels, and setting your circadian rhythm, improving sleep patterns.    Sam was always an evening dog walker.  I was always an evening fetcher.  With the nice weather and longer days, we’ve been able to push our evening walk to become a post dinner digestion walk.  I always wanted to get the walk over with before dinner so that I could chill for the rest of the evening, but I have grown to like the post dinner walk and feel like my evening digestion has improved.  Anything to improve the gains.  Put your phone away and go for a dang walk.