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MARCH 19, 2003
What You Get from Walking
With Spring just around the corner, you may be getting outside more often. Walking is one of the best and most accessible forms of outdoor exercise. Walking offers all the fitness benefits of jogging and avoids the pounding on your body. It's a painless way to shed pounds and tone up muscles. You burn about 100 calories a mile while walking briskly, which is on a par with jogging. Walking is also highly effective protection against the bone loss of osteoporosis.
How Not to Get Hurt
Walking primarily strengthens muscles in your thighs and calves. You also work your buttocks, trunk, and upper body muscles. Being overambitious when you start a walking program can cause an injury to these muscles or lead to enough discomfort that you lose interest in walking. If you feel stiff and sore a few days into your program, you may be walking too fast, too far, too soon. Don't worry about distance in the beginning. Your total time walked is more important than your distance.
Tips to Improve Your Walking
Practice proper fitness walking technique: Keep your shoulders relaxed (back and down), your head level, and your chin up. Align your shoulders directly over your hips with your spine straight. Bend your arms at the elbow at a 90 degree angle, keeping your fingers curled gently. Swing your arms like a pendulum with each step.
Warm up for 5 minutes, walking at your normal pace. Then gradually increase your speed until you feel yourself breathing rapidly, but not so hard that you can't talk. Walk for 10 minutes, and go 1 or 2 minutes more every other day until you are walking about 20 minutes.
Check your pulse while you walk and gradually increase your pace until you are within your training range (subtract your age from 220, then multiple by .60 and .85). Once you are within your training range for 20 minutes, gradually increase your distance.
Cool down by walking at your warm-up pace for 5 more minutes.
Stretch your calves (place both hands on a wall, one foot a few feet from the wall, the other a few inches away, and lean into the wall), quadriceps (stand next to a wall, put your left hand on the wall for balance and use the right hand to pull your right foot up behind you toward the buttocks), and hamstrings (sit with right leg extended and left foot on the inside of the right knee, and lean forward as far as possible with both hands). Hold each stretch for 20 seconds, then switch to the opposite body part.
When the weather is bad, walk indoors. Many malls offer free walking time before shopping hours in a safe, pleasant environment.
Set aside a time of day that's most convenient for you. You can also break up your walking time into 2 or 3 sessions per day.
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