“What is the best exercise in the world?” There are various answers, depending on the individual preference. Swimming, sprinting, basketball, rock climbing, etc. But, what if someone told you walking is the best exercise in the world, what would be your reaction?
Were you surprised? Frowned? Or, did you agree?
Many people don’t even regard walking as an exercise. To them, exercise makes us sweat and makes our heart pound. And walking doesn’t even fit in these criteria!
Surprisingly, if we walked frequently, we would reap the benefits as those any forms of exercises.
Yes, walking is anexercise. And there are 8 reasons to explain why walking is the best exercise, ever!
Let’s see how walking does the magic to us!
1. Free
“There’s no free lunch in this world!” – True. Not for walking, though. Walking is free in the following contexts.
Save money
For rock climbing, we need harness, carabiner, rope and rock climbing shoes. For swimming, we need swimsuit and swimming cap. Even for calisthenics, we might need yoga mat and pull-up bar.
For walking, literally we don’t need anything. We don’t need to purposely buy any gear and equipment for that, a pair of running shoes or clothes for instance. We can walk with whatever shoes or even walk barefoot.
Cotton clothes for walking? Yeah, just fine! – Cotton is a big No No in many exercises, but not for walking.
If you want to live frugally, walking is definitely a big factor. Potentially, you can save a lot of money on transportation by walking to the nearby grocery stores or shop.
Not only can it save money, it is healthy and environmentally friendly, too! – Guess what? We should advocate walking to cut down air pollution.
Mental effortless
“No pain no gain” motto? We hear this thousand times when we want to get shredded or lose weight, and this makes exercise pain in the ass and dreadful.
You know what? SCREW IT! We don’t give a damn if we walk.
We walk whenever and wherever we want. And we don’t have to make a MENTAL EFFORT to tell our brain “it’s walking session” to initiate our workout.
And mental effort is a critical hindrance for persistence when we want to lose weight and get shredded.
We don’t really need that for walking. And that makes exercise easier.
2. Small step to big milestone
Walking is fundamental for many exercises and sports.
Think about this. Running, in its basic form, is walking. You walk while playing basketball or football. Hiking is actually walking on steep hills……
And when we are ambitious to have a thru hike or run a full marathon, these seem impossible to accomplish for newbies as we don’t know how to start……
But, these start with small and baby steps. That’s walking. This is because they are just accumulation of the steps that we take. – It’s that simple!
To train for a thru hike, we start with short day hikes. And we gradually increase our hiking mileage and it makes thru hike possible.
And to train for a marathon, we start from walking to brisk walking, then to jogging and gradually increase our speed……
Besides, we are encouraged to walk around 10,000 steps (around 8km) per day. You know that. – Well, our phones tell us.
Imagine when you complete 10,000 steps per day for 5 days in a row, you already “run” a virtual marathon. That’s cool, right?
Thus, running a marathon is not really reaching for the stars. In fact, we have done countless virtual marathons from the moment we learned to walk!
3. Physical health benefits
Walking is an aerobic exercise, though the least intense one. Nonetheless, the physical health benefits for aerobic exercises are also true for walking.
Some of the physical health benefits are:
- Enhancing cardiovascular function
- Stabilizing blood pressure
- Losing and controlling weight
- Strengthening bones and muscles
There are many more.
Well, perhaps you think we really need to walk very long and it takes forever to see the benefits. – And so, why not focusing on other exercises to get the benefits faster?
In fact, the point here is not to discourage other types of exercises. Rather, this stresses that we can get similar results by walking.
Risk-free
Bear in mind that all exercises have their inherent risk of injury. For sprinting and running, we might get knee and ankle injury. For kayaking, we might sprain our shoulder and wrist……
Once we are injured, we may need a few weeks or even months to stay out of the activities to heal and recover. And, we don’t even bother the physical health benefits at this moment.
But, walking is a risk-free exercise. You don’t need to face any risk which stops you from staying healthy and getting in shape.
10,000 steps
Does it seem to take FOREVER to see the results? Not quite, at least you can stay healthy by walking around 10,000 steps daily.
It still seems like a daily tough goal, doesn’t it?
The thing is, we don’t have to force ourselves to finish the 10,000 steps in a row.
Remember, we walk all the time. We wake up and walk to the bathroom to brush our teeth and take a shower. We run errands and do household chores.
All these steps count and contribute to the 10,000-step goal. Plus, if you spend some time to go out and take a walk in the park, 10,000 steps are achievable.
4. Mental health benefits
Similar to physical health benefits. Those typical mental health benefits for aerobic exercise are also true for walking.
- Improve our mood
- Reduce stress
- Reduce depressed feeling
I believe you experienced before where you sat on a place too long while working. You couldn’t think of anything and suddenly your stress skyrocketed.
What would you do? You stood up and walked to the pantry, right? After a while, you had this Eureka Effect as you finally had a brilliant idea. With excitement, you got back to work!
In fact, we think intuitively while walking. This helps in our creative thinking and organizing our thought. You know what? Writers, composers, mathematicians do this while crafting their masterpiece!
5. Control Alzheimer’s disease
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia which progressively impairs the cognitive functions and memory of patients. It’s horrifyingly common among elders.
Plus, Alzheimer’s disease is incurable and irreversible. It causes the brain to shrink and the brain cells to die too.
Though it sounds terrifying, the decline of the cognitive functions and memory of patients can be prolonged, if there is proper care.
And, walking is one way to slow down the cognitive and memory decline.
In fact, there is a study showing that walking can stabilize Alzheimer’s disease patients’ cognitive function.
What the study is about
The researchers conducted the study on mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease patients with age between 63 and 98. Necessary questionnaires were given to both the patients and caretakers before the test to assess the cognitive functions of the patients.
Then, the researchers divided the patients into 2 groups, ie active group and sedentary group based on the assessment from the questionnaires.
The patients in the active group did physical activities, mainly leisure walking and brisk walking, in their normal daily lives.
At the end of the study (1-year follow up), the researchers found that:
- The MMSE (cognitive) score improved for those patients who walked around 2 hours / week
- The MMSE score slightly reduced for those patients who walked around 1 hour / week
- Significant drop in the MMSE score for the sedentary group
What it means
Regardless of the duration, walking generally helps preserve the cognitive functions of Alzheimer’s disease patients. Non-physical activity (ie sitting) doesn’t help in the decline at all.
The greater the duration of walking is, the better it helps stabilize cognitive functions.
These results tell us that in order to take care of Alzheimer’s disease patients properly, caretakers should help and encourage the patients to walk frequently, but not restrict them from moving at all.
6. Vascular dementia & stroke
Vascular dementia and stroke have strong relationship. And walking plays important roles in both vascular dementia and stroke respectively.
Vascular dementia prevention
Vascular dementia is the second most common type of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease. It’s caused by insufficient blood flow to the brain due to blockage or leakage of blood.
Hence, it causes strokes, mostly mini strokes, on the brain. This causes cognitive and memory functions decline, despite the unawareness of patients.
A study, in this article, shows that both physical activities (walking and climbing stairs) and moderate activities (housework, gardening, etc) help prevent vascular dementia.
How does walking help prevent vascular dementia? Ravaglia, the author of the study, said these activities might improve cerebral blood flow and hence reduce cerebrovascular disease risk.
Stroke recovery
Strokes are sudden and might be fatal. What’s even more terrifying is strokes are really common.
According to World Stroke Organization, there are over 13 million people will have a stroke each year and around 5.5 million people will die as a result.
Even for stroke survivors, they experience the following detrimental cognitive functions decline:
- Speech difficulty
- Coordination difficulty
- Numbness of face, arms, or legs
- Walking difficulty or paralysis
And walking is crucial for stroke recovery therapy. – It’s saddening to learn that walking, activity that we take for granted, suddenly becomes challenging.
Our brain needs stimulation to reactivate and relearn the cognitive functions. And walking, even slow walking, helps trigger the stimulation and increase blood flow to the brain.
Sometimes, I feel fascinated by the way that we are designed. You see, walking is so natural and effortless that we don’t pay attention to.
But, walking has tremendous healing power when our body needs it. In this case, we walk not merely for exercise, but to heal our body and our brain.
Not only these. Indeed, it brings us to the next point.
7. Cancer
Similar to strokes, cancer is also very common. It’s scary as it can be fatal as well. Luckily, cancer is preventable and curable.
The standard emphasizes proper and clean diet and exercise to prevent cancer. This is ideal.
There’s a catch, though. We face a lot of temptations. We can’t resist nice (but unhealthy) food and we give excuses to ourselves.
And, we are so busy with our work schedule. We are fatigue and we don’t have any energy left to exercise after our work.
These require huge determination to stay healthy (to prevent cancer, of course). But let’s face it. We are human. We couldn’t be “perfect” all the time. – Does that mean we can’t prevent cancer with hectic lifestyle?
In fact, walking is an easy and effective way to stay healthy. Besides, it has close relationship with cancer prevention and survivorship.
Cancer prevention
There was a study that consists of 1.44 million healthy participants to study the relationship between physical activity and the risk of cancer.
At the end of the study (11-year follow up), 186,932 people developed cancers.
Apart from that, the researchers also found that leisure-time physical activities (eg, walking, running, swimming, etc) reduce the risk of 13 types of cancers. These include liver, lung, kidney, colon, bladder, breast, etc.
Cancer survivorship
Surprisingly, walking pace affects mortality rate in cancer survivorship.
A study, based on this article, shows that cancer survivors are 42% more likely to have poor ambulatory function (slow walking pace & unable to walk). And this cancer survivor group has higher mortality risk for up to 5 years after cancer treatment.
Though the study didn’t specifically mention the cause of poor ambulatory function in cancers, this study opened the possibility of treatments to extend the life of cancer survivors in future.
8. Spiritual
Walking serves an important role in some religions. And, they have the same purpose: PILGRIMAGE. Pilgrims walk to look for moral and spiritual purposes and to hope that they could gain sacred protection and blessing.
Besides, when you hear MEDITATION, what comes to your mind?
Well, we probably imagine ourselves sitting with our eyes closed and legs crossed, focusing on our breath and thoughts……
This is the typical meditation that we know. In fact, there are many forms of meditation: sound meditation, mindfulness meditation, informal meditation etc.
What if I tell you that we can meditate while walking? Cool, isn’t it?
Well, it isn’t fancy. Walking meditation is very common in Buddhism. If you travelled to Thailand or Japan, for instance, you might notice the monks walk in circles. And they were actually meditating by walking!
A pilot study shows that mindful walking and mood complement each other to create an upward spiral effect. Furthermore, mindful walking shows the following improvements:
- Reduce depressed feeling
- Reduce anxiety
- Relief stress
- Increase mindfulness skills
Also, the result is in line with the typical mental benefits above.
Why walking meditation
Sometimes, it’s difficult to perform sitting meditation. Those agitated thoughts distract us from experiencing calmness.
So, it is easier to perform mindful walking because you have “something” to pay attention to while meditating. And that’s your feet.
And you might face numbness and pain on your feet while sitting to meditate. Walking meditation, however, doesn’t have these issues at all!
Final thought: walking is the best exercise
Walking is something we do daily without paying attention to. We take walking as granted.
But, walking is the best exercise ever, regardless of genders, ages, ethnics and races. As walking is an also aerobic exercise, we reap the similar physical and mental benefits as if we are running, swimming, etc.
Walking seems powerless. But it indeed is powerful when our body and brain need healing and recovery.
Lastly, not only is walking the best exercise, but it is also crucial for spiritual purpose. And that’s why pilgrimage is still important in some religions despite the advancement of transportation. Also, monks practice walking meditation for same purpose, too. – Other exercises definitely won’t serve this purpose, at all!
So, do you think walking is the best exercise?
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