Did You Know?
Walking has often been characterized as the universal exercise. Whether you are looking to improve fitness, restore strength after a surgical procedure, lose some weight, or are simply doing so because you enjoy spending time outdoors, walking has a lot of benefits that are often not thought of. In addition, it is inexpensive, as all it requires is a pair of shoes. The benefits of walking include the following:
- Increased heart and lung function / fitness
- Helps increase circulation and internal organ function
- Creates a muscle pump that assists with leg/foot swelling (it creates a sump pump effect for the legs)
- Burns calories (for weight loss) and reduces body fat
- Creates gentle compression and distraction of the spine which helps nourish our discs and lubricate our joints (this in particular is helpful for patients that have arthritis)
- Helps us manage conditions such as Diabetes, Hypertension, and High Cholesterol.
- Helps maintain bone density (in the case of osteoporosis)
- Helps increase endurance or activity tolerance
Alternative Options
Despite the above mentioned benefits of walking, it is important to remember that NO ONE gets better doing things that make them feel worse. Walking simply because it is a good activity at the expense of knee or foot pain due to an orthopedic problem is not justified. Making one problem better at the expense of making something else worse does not help the overall state of a person’s well being. Instead, other environments or movement patterns can be considered such as:
- Walking in a pool
- Decreased weight bearing (Dependent on depth of water)
- Decreased Impact
- Still offers the heart and lung benefits
- Still burns calories
- Still offers joint lubrication
- Elliptical Use
- Allows for full functional use of joints while decreasing Impact
- Still offers the heart and lung benefits
- Still burns calories
Here is some additional data about walking that might be interesting, particularly due to the fact that many people are using wearable technology to count steps or measure exertion.
- Average adult takes 4000, to 6000 steps per day
- Average person will take 2,000 steps if they walk one mile
- Average person walks 100,000 miles in one lifetime which is roughly a total of 200 million steps
- A 180lb person absorbs about 76.2 tons on each foot while walking one mile and about 121.5 tons per foot while running one mile.
- Average person walking 3.0 mph will take 6,000 steps in an hour long walk, but increasing your speed to 4.0 will increase the number of steps taken to 9,120
