Why Walking is the Ultimate Exercise You’re Ignoring

Hey.

Hey.

And welcome to Everyday Vitality.

This is your host, Kristin.

Today we are going to dive into walking, why we were actually designed to walk and what the benefits are to your health.

Welcome to Everyday Vitality, the podcast that empowers you to live your healthiest, most vibrant life naturally.

I'm Kristen Fitch, your guide to natural wellness.

Over the years, I've learned the importance of embracing holistic health, from clean living to ancestral practices to help me feel my best and keep me improving my wellness.

In each episode, we'll explore how alternative health nourishing habits and natural therapies can enhance your energy, vitality, and health.

Let's dive in and make every day a step towards living well naturally.

All right.

We are talking about the magic of walking, and I think it gets a bad rap.

I think walking gets a bad rap because we think that it's not an exercise.

I think there's a lot of us out there that think walking.

I mean, I walk from my house to my car, I walk from my house to the grocery store.

We don't think about moving our bodies and doing it regularly.

And throughout the day, we don't think about how much impact it really has on our health, on our longevity, on lowering our stress levels.

So it literally is one of the super charged things that we can be doing in our life to be healthier, to have vitality.

And so we're going to talk about some of the benefits of walking.

And the first thing that I want to tell you is everyone can walk, I should say, or everyone that does not have a crippling disability that doesn't allow them to walk.

So even if you're somebody that has a problem with one of your legs or even if you're somebody that is using a walker, I'm assuming that's not most of our audience or most of us, but even those people could walk using an assistive aid or tool.

And so we want to be walking even after you have a major surgery.

Like people I know that have had hip replacements, they get you up and walking the same day.

They don't want you laying around even though you just had major surgery on one of your joints or areas of your body, because they know that there's better outcomes when we move our bodies and we're made to move them, we don't want to be sedentary.

All right, so what does some of the data say?

Well, first of all, if we walk and we hit over 7,500 steps a day, then we actually increase our chances of living longer.

So Some of the data says for every thousand steps you walk above 4,000 per day, it reduces the risk of dying early by 15%.

So walking between 6,000 and 13,000 steps a day, that's our risk of dying early in half.

So it literally can save your life.

And another study said that it was from the JAMA study, which is, I think the Journal of American or American Medical association, says 10 minutes of walking a day adds years to your life, which is similar to what I just said.

The Lancet did a study, they had 47,000 participants over seven years, and they found that as your steps increased per day, you decreased your mortality.

So another win in the column or checkbox for living longer.

If we walk more and we walk regularly, then Sports medicine did a meta analysis, and they found that walking just two minutes a day after a meal, of course, I would encourage you to walk more than two minutes a day after a meal.

It helps lower our blood sugar and it improves our overall health.

In other words, if we take a short walk after our meals, especially if we're having a bigger meal or especially our evening meal, it helps our digestion, it helps our blood sugar or our glucose numbers be more stable.

And so those things are both going to help our overall health.

So, once again, walking in general, adding more steps and then walking after meals, they're both major minor things, and minor being that they're easy to do.

It doesn't require a cost, it doesn't require any equipment, but if you do them, you are increasing longevity.

You are improving your overall health by stabilizing your blood sugar and by helping your body digest that food, which is awesome.

Okay?

Another thing is that walking 60 minutes a day cuts your obesity risk by half.

And walking actually lowers your risk of Alzheimer's.

So if you want to stay mentally sharp, you want to have, you know, you want your brain to keep working for you, right?

As you get older, as you're in your 40s now, maybe your 50s or beyond, 60s, 70s and beyond.

If we walk, we are meant to walk, and it's putting stimulation into our.

You know, we're seeing things, we're looking at things.

We're moving our body like we're supposed to.

We're not living a sedentary life.

So just the act of walking lowers our chances of having cognitive decline.

That is amazing.

The other thing is walking is a simple thing we can do every day that lowers our stress levels.

And I think most of us have heard at this point that high stress, right, when we keep.

When we stay in a stressful state.

It increases our chances of, you know, one mentally us being more, having some struggles, but also physically.

Right.

They tie high levels of stress with worse health outcomes or high levels of stress with more disease.

And so we want to be lowering our stress every day.

Here's the other thing.

You can walk anywhere.

Of course, I encourage you to get outside and walk.

It's cold this time of year.

As I'm recording this in January.

Now, my home where I live is not as cold as some of your homes.

I live where it was about 29 degrees this morning when I walked.

It was cold.

I know some of you are in the negatives or in the teens and it's much colder.

But whether you get outside and walk or whether you go to an indoor gym and walk, whether you have to walk in a grocery store or a bookstore, you can get in some steps.

And the other thing I want to point out is you do not have to get in all of your steps at one time.

So you might say I don't have an hour to walk or it's dark when I get home from work.

And when I get up to go to work, when am I going to walk?

Well, the good news is we can walk in just 5 minute spurts, 10 minute spurts.

And as long as you're just walking enough throughout the day, you're going to hit those steps.

And it's cumulative so it doesn't have to be at one time.

So I always do at least a 30 minute walk, sometimes a 45 minute or an hour walk.

But I'm also walking throughout the day.

Maybe that particular day I'm running errands.

So I park further from the store and I walk know through the store a couple extra times just to get in some more steps.

So it's easy for us to add in steps.

And the next thing I want to share with you is that there was a great interview.

It was on the over it and on with it podcast.

The host of that show is, let's see, Christine, I think Hassler and she interviewed Mark Sisson.

And if you don't know who that is, he is the, he is the founder or owner of, Sorry, let me see here.

Primal Kitchen, which is basically a food condiment company.

So a lot of you might have heard of him.

And if you haven't, he has basically been making Primal or Paleo style keto style food.

So in other words, his condiments don't have sugar and they're just sort of high quality ingredients and they're just, they're cleaner for you.

But he just wrote a new book called Born to Walk, and it is kind of like a flip flop from a book written a couple decades ago, I think, called Born to Run.

But basically, he explains that we're not born to run, at least not born to run all the time, every day, height, far distances, because it breaks down our body in ways that are hard on us.

But he says we are born to walk, right?

So historically, ancestrally, we've always walked everywhere.

We've carried things, we've walked to new towns, we've walked to new continents, if you will.

You know, we might have walked and then taken a boat and walked, but we were designed to walk and we can walk for hours and hours if needed.

And so I think his book sounds amazing.

I think it just came out, so I haven't gotten it yet.

But his interview is really cool.

And it talks about how walking is actually such a perfect physical activity.

It's an aerobic exercise.

In other words, it lets us stay in a target heart range, the heart rate range, so that we are burning calories, we're using energy, but we're not tearing down our bodies and we're not going beyond, you know, we're not staying at a high heart rate exercise.

So it's actually very healthy for us.

And I'm not, you know, he's not saying that you shouldn't sometimes go on a jog or do, you know, sprinting or other exercises.

He's just saying that walking shouldn't be put in a category as if it's not a great thing we should all be doing.

You know, he's explaining this is something we should all be doing.

And it kind of gets a bad rap, right?

People think that it's not as cool as running or it doesn't sound like exercise.

You know, they just think walking, right?

You walk because you can't run.

And that's not true walking.

Some of the healthiest people, you walk every day.

And there's so many stories of people that walked.

They added hours of walking a week to their life and they've lost weight.

They're in the best shape they've ever been because actually when you walk, you're building muscles.

But if you run too much or if you do other anaerobic exercises too much, you can actually break down your muscle and you're not building it back up.

And so he talks about that much more than I can go into detail about that, but it's really interesting.

So, for instance, he explains when he was a Top level marathon runner and actually an Iron man triathlete.

He was slimmer, but not as fit looking as when he started walking a lot more instead of running because he ended up with a hip injury because of over training, which he, I guess he's had.

He had a hip energy injury for 30 years before he had to then recently get a hip surgery for it.

So the point is, is walking literally is life saving.

Walking is a de stressing tool for us.

It can be an enjoyable tool.

You know, we can do it with friends, we can do it by ourselves.

You can learn as you walk, you can listen to a podcast, you can listen to music.

But the point is, is it's so good for you.

And if you want to live and be have vitality every day of your life, then walking is something that if you're not doing it, you want to add into your daily routine.

And if you are already walking, then I would challenge you and myself to step up how many steps you do a day, unless you're already doing a couple hours because it is such a great tool to hack our health, if you will.

And so guys, get out there, get moving.

And if you're somebody that thinks, well, I don't know how to track my steps, well, you can buy a cheap pedometer that you just put on your waist.

I probably for $5.

They obviously have watches that track our steps, pros and cons to those, of course, because they're constantly trying to pull information and kind of pinging you.

But there's lots of ways to track your information or just figure out the path one time, the distance and then you'll know.

Okay, every time I do that loop, it's this many steps, you know, in that time frame.

So for instance, I know if I do my same loop and it's 35 minutes, about 40 minutes, I know on average how many steps I'm hitting for that walk.

And so I can track it.

But it is easier to track your steps when you do have a device on that's actually telling you your steps because I'm not necessarily tracking my just walking around my home, office, my home, when I run errands, if I don't have on a tracker.

But in general, I know if I get in some of my walks, well, my daily walks, then I'm hitting the steps for the week.

So I hope this information helps you live your best life and makes you feel even more vital.

So until next time, have a great week and I'll see you back here soon.

Thanks again for listening to everyday vitality.

This is your host, Kristin.

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