Walking as the Ultimate Exercise

 Walking as the Ultimate Exercise

The problem with most people’s walking is that they are doing it very poorly — reinforcing bad posture and movement — whether they’re taking 10 steps or 10,000 steps. You are what you practice, and if that is shuffling one’s feet because of the lack of balance, it doesn’t matter how many times you do it because you are only reinforcing bad movement. The same with walking stooped over. And so what a person has to do, is practice walking perfectly and efficiently — which is what walking with trekking poles comes closest to simulating — as the “Nordic” walking style, which seems very contrived to most people because the use of the arms and poles, lifts their torso into an exaggerated upright and erect posture as they use their arms to propel themselves.

Many older and disabled people have difficulties standing — let alone walking, but hardly notice it because they walk so minimally. They walk a little more with the aid of walkers and canes, but walking that way doesn’t usually restore them to the proper walking gait — until and unless they actually practice it. That would mean graduating to walking with trekking poles — which is the proper gait — with or without poles. In either case, what matters is that they perform the movement correctly — and not that it is harder, and therefore, better.

It is like performing any movement — perfectly, precisely and efficiently, and not made better because it is more difficult or impossible to do — and so one does it badly, or not at all. That was precisely the reason for the development of exercise machines — not primarily to make exercises harder, but more usefully, to make such movements possible and easier to many more. The best example is the pull-up — which most people cannot do even one. The solution is not to force them to do ten, but to reduce the weight (resistance) so even one is possible, and then even further so that an adequate number of them can be done — which is at least 50 to activate and sustain that blood flow that builds that muscle.

One is not going to be sufficient for activating and perfecting that movement — but 50 done regularly will establish that nerve stimulation and blood flow, and the objective is to nourish those structures to make them grow and function well. For that purpose, the body doesn’t care whether it is a new record accomplishment in a single lift, but is building the capacity and reserve for any subsequent efforts it may have to make in the future along that lines. That is what muscle and that infrastructure is. Unfortunately, that is what is lost to most beginning exercisers who are focused on the wrong things — instead of the singular importance of the movement itself. They are usually advised to make it as difficult and impossible from the beginning — and to increase the workload to make the movement unrecognizable — which is obviously the wrong form.

But in walking, two legs are good, but four are indeed better — and more stable. Walking with trekking poles changes that equation. One is using four appendages for locomotion — and in monkeys and apes, the reason their arms are more impressively muscled than their legs. The only improvement I would suggest for making walking with trekking poles an even better exercise, is to forgo the use of the straps in favor of gripping the poles without them to make it that same better use of the grip and upper body development — which then becomes like the monkey swinging from branch to branch. The straps eliminate the need to develop this grip (strength) and the upper body development emanating from that contraction from the most distal axis of those structures — rather than limiting this movement at the shoulders as most exercise machines also do. Or the hips.

In this manner, the fullest articulation of the joints at the extremities can be exercised — ensuring the optimal circulation through the most essential organs at the head, hands and feet — rather than stopping at the shoulders and hips because there is no further articulation beyond those joints (axes).