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Only walking for exercise?
- j45 3y agoWalking for exercise, where there is not much/often stopping at intersections works amazingly well. Your heart rate builds up in a different way. And all that continuous walking gets a little faster and faster after a few months and can turn into jogging/running on it's own, except you have learned how to maintain your heart rate a bit more.
- feverzsj 3y agoThat doesn't feel good for my old knees.
- woleium 3y agowith the right technique and shoes, and a slow progression to more strenuous exercise, you will be surprised what old knees can do
- candiddevmike 3y agoDid you run when you were younger?
- stavros 3y agoWhich way does this go, "ah, you didn't run enough to get strong knees", or "ah, you ran too much and damaged your knees"?
- Swizec 3y agoSerious competitive athletes break their bodies in youth and never fully recover. For the rest of us we probably didn’t do enough when younger. There is a wiiiiiide space of healthy activity levels between couch potato and 100 mile per week future Olympian hopeful.
- stavros 3y agoDefinitely, but I did manage to seriously injure my back doing some deadlifts for light strength training, so the space probably isn't as wide as you might think.
- Swizec 3y agoDeadlifts are also famous for having a high injury rate. I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone who doesn’t have a base core strength and a coach of some sort to teach proper technique. For things like walking and running the safety margins are much bigger. Then again maybe not, I had my sister who trained track in high school teach me technique before I started running more seriously.
- stavros 3y agoYeah, unfortunately the book Starting Strength made it sound like it was extremely safe to do on your own. The "no true Scotsman" of "if you got injured, you were doing it wrong by definition" didn't help.
- Swizec 3y agoIf it helps you feel better, I know people who were lifting heavy for years, even competing in bodybuilding and threw out their back moving an empty bar because they didn’t think of it as a deadlift and used poor form
- thefaux 3y agoIt seems to me that it is important to communicate that you can injure yourself easily if you do deadlifts wrong. With any weightlifting exercise it is important to start with an easy weight and make sure that you are confident that you have good form before adding weight. Deadlifting can be done safely which is evinced by the many people who have done it without injuring themselves. I feel for you that you got bad advice. I do agree however that with good form, it should be difficult to injure yourself seriously deadlifting. The rub is that not everyone has the ability to self-assess and some coaches are also bad. If you are not very confident you will not hurt yourself, you absolutely should not deadlift heavy weights.
- akkad33 3y agoMy money is on option a
- sn9 3y agoUse it or lose it is basically a basic principle of physiology. Injury risk comes down to doing things your body isn't prepared for through inappropriate load and fatigue management.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoTheir experiment seems to not be conclusive to my reading. They layered eccentric exercise after four weeks of walking exercise. They compare four weeks of walking exercise to eight weeks of walking exercise plus four weeks of eccentric exercise and don’t control for the fact eight weeks of walking is twice as much as four. That said there’s a lot of evidence eccentric contraction is crucial for strength gain. But this experiment isn’t convincing alone.
- bee_rider 3y agoIt sort of makes seems reasonable in some vague and non-scientific sense that we’d be optimized for walking across slightly rough terrain (with logs, little streams, and rocks to amble across), rather than perfectly flat roads. Dirt paths look nicer than sidewalks anyway, so I guess we’re just going to have to tear up the streets and stroads all together, rather than trying to staple on walkability!
- dieselgate 3y agoCheck out the book “Born to Run”
- BeetleB 3y agoBe a bit wary of that book. While I can't speak to its main thesis, people have found serious faults with claims about various cultures/groups having great health outcomes due to their walking. Apparently some of them have very poor health outcomes (perhaps unrelated to walking, but you get my point).
- mvdtnz 3y agoThe book is widely discredited and thankfully the barefoot running trend is behind us.
- nytesky 3y agoIs it having a resurgence or just never died? https://time.com/6284245/walking-barefoot-health-risks/ https://time.com/6284245/walking-barefoot-health-risks/
- emseetech 3y agoThat article seems entirely centered around the dangerous around cuts and bacteria, with no indication it's bad for muscle or bone. While some fundamentalists might go completely barefoot, I've always heard people talk about that book in terms of using light sole shoes instead of heavy shoes, not ditching protective footwear entirely. Even the subject of that book often wear thin moccasins during long distance runs.
- toddmorey 3y agoI don't quite understand. Are they saying that eccentric walking (lunges) can take the place of the suggested strength training?
- iammjm 3y agoThe Ministry of Silly Walks would like to have a talk with you sir
- dmje 3y agoHave an upvote, but more seriously - there seems little point in suggesting a method of exercise (however great it might be) that literally no one is going to take up because you look like a loon doing it…
- jerlam 3y agoThe latest fad is running backwards: https://marathonhandbook.com/retro-running-backwards/ https://marathonhandbook.com/retro-running-backwards/
- sn9 3y agoIt's about finding a level of exercise that won't be intimidating to people who don't exercise.
- coldtea 3y agoIt might as well be the case for a health benefits sweet spot after which there are diminishing returns. Health is not the same as strength.
- squarefoot 3y agoSince the road accident a few years back, paired with a coxarthrosis, I can't walk much as I used to, but found drumming practice to be very useful to keep in shape and have lots of fun without carrying high loads. I still carry on the stairs groceries, wood for the fireplace and sixpacks of 2lt water bottles, but that doesn't happen every day thankfully.
- throw1234651234 3y ago1. The title sucks. This article is basically about adding lunges on top of walks. Conclusion: "Yes, adding lunges is good". Again, the title and the setup for this article completely misrepresent what it's saying. 2. My opinion, nothing to do with the article, though a lot to do with the misleading title: Overall, walking for 30 mins to an hour a day is huge and will increase fitness an incredible amount over nothing. Of course, it can replace neither intensive cardio, weight lifting, or mobility work. But throw a few hills in there, and it's probably sufficient to stay healthy.
- jupp0r 3y agoThey found that introducing exercise increases fitness/health outcomes. That doesn't solve the problem that the vast majority of people don't exercise.
- potatoman22 3y agoTL;DR: "We found no significant changes in any of the outcomes in the first four weeks when participants walked conventionally. From week four to 12, we found significant improvements in muscle strength (19%), chair-stand ability (24%), balance (45%) and a cognitive function test (21%)... The sample size of the study was small (N = 11), so we need larger and more comprehensive studies to verify our findings"
- tchvil 3y agoI experienced acute lower back pain after walking for 30+ minutes. I searched the whole internet to find a solution but only found advice saying, "if you have back pain, walk!" which was ironic since my pain occurred while walking. Then it dawned on me: I sit most of the day, cycle a lot, and drive my car, but I wasn't walking regularly. Now, I walk the dog for 40 minutes a few days a week, and the pain has disappeared!
- nunez 3y agoWalking gets pushed aside in fitness conversations, but it is a very good, low-impact, medium-cardio, and completely maligned exercise that is very sustainable and can go a long way for many people. (People like doing higher-impact activity to feel like they put in the work. Which they did! But many of those health benefits could be realized with daily long walks, daily stretching, and better dietary choices, and I say this as someone who literally wrote this while eating cheesecake LOL. It was a small size though! And I track calories!) Here's why I think walking is completely maligned. First reason: Suburbs. The biggest issues that I have with American suburbs is that there is nothing interesting to walk to, most of the jobs can only be reached by car and walking infrastructure outside of housing enclaves is nonexistent. So you're either walking at work (good luck if you have an office job) or making time to walk at home. Given that the cheapest housing in most of the US is in the suburbs, this problem will only accelerate. Second reason: HOKAs. Walking is further compromised by massively popular footwear that is terrible for the kinetic chain. A lot of people wear running shoes for walking. These are plushier at the expense of unwanted shock compensation at the ankles, knees, and hips. However, minimalist footwear that exploded in popularity after Born to Run and xero on Shark Tank wasn't good either, as runners got injured like crazy trying to heel strike with shoes that are designed to prevent exactly that. Sneakers in the 70s and 80s were low-drop and low stack. I prefer zero drop with barefoot stack (soles less than 6mm thick) but I wish we could return to those, as those are so much safer. Third reason: Fucking flip flops. I also wish we could completely ditch flip flops for proper sandals with heel support. Flip flops are unsafe (no support if you slip) and are a huge contributor to plantar fasciitis (imagine your toes trying to grab onto something for support...on every step...for MONTHS at a time!). They're fine for extremely short distances, like walking from the beach to somewhere inside, but they are a huge problem for everyday footwear!
- bitterchicken 3y agoI’ve worn flip flops daily since 2005 (yay startups that don’t care about dress code). High have no foot problems, arches are normal, my toes are strong and it helps with balance. The only time I wear socks and shoes is hiking and the gym (or fashionable shoes for going out). Retired in 2016 and started walking at least ten miles a day… in flip flops. Recently need a goal and got to a little over twenty. Ymmv (Edit: spelling)
- indigo0086 3y agoAdd elevation sand modify terrain to hike, as weight to ruck. Just walking is great and there's fun weight to keep it interesting as boredom can kill habits
- zeroq 3y agoWalking is an excelent entry point for obese people. Instead of killing yourself and getting immensly frustrated at the gym, it gives you incredible initial gains. Being really out of shape is a downward spiral - the worse it gets the harder it is to perform "normal" excercises, like gym, jogging, or even bike riding. And it's really annoying, remembering how easy these were for you just few pounds earlier.