CHAPTER TWO Part 2: Walking to Physical and Mental Health
“It is not God, but people themselves who shorten their lives by not keeping
physically fit.”
Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Naturalist 1707‑1778‑1763
Upper Body
Do not neglect the muscle groups above your waistline. Try to develop
strength and flexibility in the body’s entire muscular system with an upper
body exercise program paralleling your lower body walking program. Too
many Americans, including runners, are weak in the upper body. To build
up your upper body muscle groups, use rowing machines, health riders, free and
fixed weights, and swimming. Having a stronger upper body, along with
strong legs, gives you a balanced physique that is necessary for full
participation in life including outdoor recreational activities, such as
backpacking, cross country skiing, snowshoeing, and canoeing.
An excellent method to exercise your upper body while walking is walking with walking
poles similar to those used in cross‑country skiing, but with a rubberized tip
instead of the ski poles sharp tip and basket. Pole walking is not
difficult to learn. While holding the poles in the hands, loosely swing
your arms from the shoulders, not from the elbows. Gradually extend the
swing of your arms with each stride. As the rubber tip of each pole meets
the trail surface apply pressure on the pole pushing down and back. As
this is done, the upper arms should be moving forward and back as they do with
fitness walking. Using the poles causes your abdominal muscles to
contract about 2,000 times a mile. The more physical pressure that you
apply to pushing both backward and down on your poles will increase the
intensity of your exercise. The crucial
point in pole walking is that - besides toning your arms, upper back, and
abdominal muscles - the use of the poles also results in a 30% to 50% increase
in energy expenditures.
To gain even greater benefits from the use of the poles, occasionally try
double poling. This is moving both poles forward and pressing them down
at the same time as is done with cross‑country skiing.
Any pole or stick will do as long as it is the proper length for you.
With your arm bent at the elbow at a 90-degree angle and with the pole held
upright with the tip resting on the ground, the “handle” should fit comfortably
in the hand. A pair of broom sticks fitted with rubber tips from a
hardware store work about as well as manufactured walking poles.
A recent University of Wisconsin study showed that women who were involved in a
ten-week pole walking program accumulated a 38% increase in their upper body
muscular endurance.
Mental Health
Mozart wrote: “When I’m out strolling on my own and in a good mood after a good
meal, that is when the ideas come most abundantly.”
A short list of the eighteenth and nineteenth century English writers who
walked for exercise and inspiration were Jane Austen, Robert Lewis Stevenson,
Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Samuel Taylor,
William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Besides the beneficial effects on the physique, walking can also serve to
improve the efficiency of the mind. Beginning walkers find that walking
increases alertness, reduces depression, improves sleep, and lessens tension
headaches as well as promoting a more youthful outlook on life. By
increasing the flow of glucose to the brain, walking improves your ability to
resolve problems; so you can learn new skills and process information faster.
“It is solved by walking” Latin Proverb
In addition, walking triggers the release of beta‑endorphin, the body’s
tranquilizing chemical, into your brain. Beta‑endorphin acts to naturally
reduce the everyday tensions that often prompt many people to overeat.
“All Truly Great Thoughts Are Conceived By Walking,” ‑ Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844‑1900) German philosopher and poet.
Moreover, the mind processes the visual information from a human-constructed
urban area and a natural landscape differently. Building and trees
reflect light differently and have different shapes for the mind to
process. These differences between indoors and outdoors extend to the
texture of the surface under your feet, the sounds you hear, and the
temperature, and motion, of the air. These different sensory experiences
are processed by the human mind differently. CAT scanning has shown that
a natural scene triggers some parts of the human brain, while a human
constructed scene triggers other areas. Thus, outdoor areas provide a
much richer variety of stimuli for the mind than indoor areas.
Philosophers have suggested that all great religions and intellectual movements
have been stimulated by direct experience in nature. As Nietzsche wrote,
“All great ideas come from walking.”
After the walk
After an exercise walking session you may want to reward yourself with a small
carton of skim milk or a cup of soup, but avoid the temptations of candy bars
or those so‑called “extra value meals.” Small rewards can add structure
to your walking routine, until walking becomes second nature. Then, you
may wish to cut back or discontinue the rewards.
“The fewer our needs, the more we resemble the gods” ‑ Socrates.
(469‑399 B.C.) Athenian philosopher and educator
Diet Dangers
There are three major problems with weight reduction regimes that only reduce
food intake.
First, simply taking in fewer calories than usual may cause your body to start
to use up your lean tissue to provide glucose and fatty acids to the brain and
nerve cells.
Second, dieters can quickly regain body fat loss unless they also increase
energy expenditure while dieting.
Third, as you eat less food, your inherited Stone Age hunter‑gatherer body
reacts to your diet as if it were a period of famine by slowing its metabolic
rate and turning more of your ingested food to protective body fat. These
are the same body fats that allowed our ancestors to survive periods of
famine. So that today, people on a diet find that it takes fewer calories
to maintain weight and even to increase the percentage of dangerous body fat.
A slower metabolism creates a weight loss plateau that is reached in about
three months. This plateau is the point where many dieters cannot lose
any more body fat, unless they go on dangerous fasts. Some metabolism
experts suggest that dieters who are thirty to fifty pounds overweight could
benefit by losing ten to fifteen pounds in a three-month period and then maintaining
that weight for about six months, while their metabolism rates stabilize.
After that, the dieters could start on another three‑month weight loss program.
However, other metabolism experts now feel that this decreased metabolic rate
can be reduced or even prevented by a regime of increased physical
activity. A good cardiovascular workout increases the body's resting
metabolism for as long as fifteen hours afterwards, which means that for that
time period, even at rest, more calories are being consumed. This is why,
even at rest, physically active people burn more calories than sedentary
people.
Long term weight reduction programs depend on a regular, consistent, exercise
that increases energy expenditure, as much as it depends on reducing energy
intake. For many people, walking is one of the most practical ways of
increasing energy expenditure. As an example, a 155-pound person who
walks four miles a day, at the normal walking speed of 132 feet per minute, can
lose eighteen pounds in 36 weeks ‑ all without dieting.
Those who are on a regular walking program are 20 percent more successful in
losing weight, than those who choose more strenuous exercise programs, such as
running, which they may follow irregularly or drop out of completely after a
short time. In short, the consistency of exercise is more important than
its intensity in reducing overall body fat. Keep in mind that walking is
a treatment, not a cure. That’s why it is important to make exercise
walking a routine daily lifetime activity. A daily session of moderate
exercise such as walking also greatly reduces the risk of injury that often
occurs when unconditioned muscles are exercised sporadically. The popular
activities of golf and tennis, because they lack the consistency of effort that
is found in exercise walking, cannot qualify as fat reduction physical
exercises.
No comments:
Post a Comment