There are many people who do not practice fitboxing, or crossfit, or go down canyons or parachute, but simply walk. 36.4% of the population declared themselves sedentary in their free time, but more than 70% affirmed that they walk or walk daily to improve their physical shape.
According to Harvard Medical School, regular brisk walking is great for your health as it helps lower LDL (bad) cholesterol, control blood pressure, build muscle, burn calories, and lift your spirits. Walking can also help prevent high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
But for the daily walk to have more benefits, it is better not to go at a snail’s pace looking at shop windows but to try to introduce some simple guidelines.
To maintain balance, the brain must coordinate a constant stream of information from the eyes, muscles, tendons, and inner ear. All of these body parts work to keep us on our feet and provide a sense of stability when we are on the move.
To prevent falls, you have to train your balance regularly, advises Leonel Díaz González, a doctor at the Hospital Universitario de La Paz in Madrid and coordinator of the Sports Cardiology Working Group of the Spanish Society of Cardiology (SEC). His suggestion is to take advantage of the walk to strengthen the muscles of the legs, since they are the ones that give us stability, after all.
Something that can improve balance is to train strength during the walk, “doing things that you didn’t do before,” says Díaz. For example, periodically take ten steps walking from heel to toe. “The narrower the base of support when standing, the more difficult it is to maintain balance,” reports this expert.
Another strategy is to take lateral steps, “because it helps to strengthen some muscles that we usually do not use when we walk in a normal and ordinary way, such as the adductors and abductors,” he details.
A third exercise to build stability is to continue walking forward, but slowly turn your head to the left and then to the right several times in a row. If you walk in a certain direction but have to turn and look in another direction as you walk, proprioception increases, that is, the brain’s ability to integrate the exact position of all the muscles in the body with sight.
For people in good health who are well trained, carrying weights can also be a good way to strengthen bones during a walk. In sporting goods stores or on the internet you can find vests with removable weights starting at 35 euros. You can start with 1.5 kilograms, but if the vest makes it difficult to walk, causes pain or bothers it is best to leave it aside.
Another tactic within the reach of ordinary mortals “is repeatedly going up and down a simple curb or sitting on a bench and getting up and sitting down again a few times,” says the cardiologist. In this case, the golden rule is: everything that works the muscles strengthens the bones.
When we test a bone with the slight impact required to climb a ladder, for example, the bone reacts by becoming stronger.
Walking briskly makes the heart and lungs work. To make the walk more heart-healthy, Harvard Medical School recommends that at 10 minutes into a half-hour walk, you start raising your arms up and down repeatedly, in whatever way is most comfortable (for example stretching them forwards, “like a sleepwalker from old movies”, he indicates, or above the head, even to the sides, “as if he were flying”) and trying to keep the arms active, if possible, during 10 minutes. And then continue walking for another 10 minutes, until you complete a total of 30 minutes.
The purpose of moving your arms during the walk is to engage as many muscle groups as possible. In particular, the larger ones: the back, the chest, the shoulders, the legs…”. The more muscle groups we use, the more benefits at the cardiovascular level”, says Díaz. “Nordic walking is very good for this purpose,” he adds.
Another way to get the heart to work harder during the walk is to give small accelerations from time to time. The underlying philosophy is: more than counting steps, it’s about counting benefits.
Although until recently it was thought that walking 10,000 steps a day allowed us to reach the threshold of being healthy, today it is known that it was an advertisement for the Japanese company Yamasa Tokei after introducing the “Manpokei” or “10,000-step meter” counter. , taking advantage of the fact that some research suggested that the average person only took between 3,500 and 5,000 steps a day. Yamasa’s new device had a tagline: “Let’s all walk 10,000 steps a day!” and he got the Japanese to take his advice and join hiking clubs all over the country.
However, today it is known that more than walking a set number of steps, what really works is challenging the heart, changing the rhythm from time to time. Michele Stanten, a Harvard fitness advisor, recommends, for example, sprinting for 15, 30 or 60 seconds, and then recovering to a normal rhythm in a couple of minutes until you can breathe evenly.
“High intensity training is the one that provides the greatest aerobic power in the long term, that is true. But for most people who aspire to lose weight or improve insulin resistance, low- or moderate-intensity aerobic training may be enough,” Díaz points out.
Those who frequently forget things could also improve with a walk, but in this case the key is in the word “energetic”. According to Rong Zhang, Professor of Neurology at the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern, in Dallas, Texas, to improve blood flow in the brain, it is necessary to increase the heart rate during the walk and, also, to walk for unusual places, frequently changing routes, according to his research.
