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).

How Muscle Action Keeps Us Healthy

How Muscle Action Keeps Us Healthy.

Most people are familiar with the action of the heart — as the quintessential muscle of the body — that works by the action of alternating full contractions with full relaxations, and can work no other way because it is solely dedicated to that task. It doesn’t directly cause one to jump higher, run faster, or lift more weights — as many naively think. It’s primary function is to provide for that constancy of pressure that will cause blood to flow outward towards the rest of the body — depending on the action of the voluntary (skeletal) muscles to produce varying pressure differences through their own contractions and relaxations. That is why muscles that are “exercised” in that way, grow larger and healthier that are not exercised in that manner — rather than being equally developed because the heart is pumping blood equally everywhere.

The design of the musculature is that when it contacts, the insertion (distal/distant) moves towards the origin (proximal/center), while the venous blood flow also allows movement in this same direction back towards the center — with its many valves that prevent backflow. So the important concept that most people get wrong, is that the primary function of exercise is not to pull ump more blood into an already full muscle, but by contracting reduce the volume of the muscle to accelerate this flow out of those tissues, and upon relaxation, there is now a vacuum or void to draw fresh nutrients into that space with the constant activity of the heart and arterial blood vessels.

That is the health-giving process that was noted centuries earlier as the “vital life-force” — which the Chinese called “chi” and the Indians called “prana.” The important aspect was the recognition of “flow” — that could be enhanced by deliberate “practices” — long before they “discovered “ oxygen and circulation.

Flow is the principle by which things move and is interconnected, rather than the old concept of static categories in which nothing is related to anything else, and can never be changed or effected. As understanding increased, effort could be decreased — and one could achieve greater productivity and effectiveness by eliminating the extraneous (noise) and focus only on the significant — to greater effect. Rather than jumping higher, running faster, lifting more weight, etc., the essential could be reduced to the muscle state itself — as the difference between full contractions and full relaxation optimizing the flow by contracting (compressing) the waste products and inducing new nutrients by creating the void (space) for the new due to the constant (autonomous) action of the heart.

That change is entirely within the realm of the voluntary muscles to direct — especially when it is properly understood as the default action in the body rather than increasing the resistance to it. In fact, one wishes to decrease the resistance in going from one state to the other — because it is the difference in states, that makes the difference. People get no visible results from their efforts because they do not intentionally, deliberately, and dramatically change those muscular states — that optimize the flow. Their exercises consist of little to no movement at the furthest extremities at the axes of the neck, wrists, and ankles — where the retention is the problem. It doesn’t matter how much harder and faster the heart is working. The is virtually no movement and change of muscular states at the axes of extremities leading them to conclude that those are the most difficult body parts to develop — when the fact of the matter, is that they are not moving there specifically — and that changes the body.