How You Can Use This Simple But Powerful 20 Minute Walking Practice To Improve Your Health And Wellbeing
IF Insider No. 56
In our last issue (IF Insider No. 55) we looked at photobiomodulation…the use of red light therapy for health and healing. In this issue, we will examine something much more low-tech but just as powerfully effective…the practice of walking.
For our premium subscribers, in this week’s Research Spotlight, we will dive into a new study done early this year that looks at walking’s effect on cognitive health as you age. Exciting work!
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Using A Walking Practice For Health
Today we will look at walking, including some of its benefits, how much walking you should be doing to get the best effect, and then we will look at a type of walking known as PACE walking. People also do walking as meditation, and there is also a type of tai chi walking known as Bagua. We are not going to go into those today, but there are two things that I want to say about those types of walking before we look at PACE.
There are a lot of resources out there about walking meditation, which has its roots in many Eastern traditions. The renowned meditation teacher Jack Kornfield has a walking meditation audio that you may want to reference if this topic interests you.
Dr. Peter Attia, who Denise and I follow closely for his insights on health, said recently in his podcast that one of the much-overlooked pillars of health is Stability, especially as we get older. He emphasized that we have lost much of the proprioceptive ability of our feet, meaning how you sense with them and know their position in space. The late Buddhist monk and walking meditation teacher Thich Nat Hahn advised that we should walk as if our feet were kissing the earth. I daresay most of us don’t come anywhere close to that!
Another practice with its roots in the East is Bagua Circle walking, a form of tai chi, which can help with stability, balance and also, I believe, can increase the proprioceptive ability of the feet as well.
Let’s briefly examine some of the benefits of a regular walking practice. Because it is low impact, it’s much easier on your joints than running and is a better way to exercise for many people, especially those with knee, ankle, or back problems or who are overweight or obese. After many years of playing second fiddle to running, walking is coming back into its own as a great way to exercise. It has a laundry list of benefits, both physical and psychological.
Walking improves:
~ Overall fitness
~ Cardiac health
~ Improves depression
~ Relieves fatigue
~ Reduces pain
~ Helps to prevent weight gain
~ Decreases the risk of cancer as well as the risk of other chronic diseases
~ Improves endurance
~ Improves posture
~ Reduces risk of stroke
~ Improves memory and prevents the actual deterioration of brain tissue as you age
But the cherry on top is this: compared to no leisure-time physical activity, regular walking reduces your risk of death from any cause by a whopping 39%.
We are not going to go into each one of these benefits in detail but let’s bring just a couple of these to your attention, one physical and one mental:
In 2013, researchers looked at the health of 33,000 participants in the National Runners Health Study and compared that to the health over six years of 15,000 participants in the National Walker’s Health Study. The runners had a lower risk of high blood pressure (38%), high cholesterol (%36), and diabetes (71%) regardless of the amount of running they reported engaging in. So running is better, right? Well, not so fast.
But when the researchers controlled for how much energy the exercisers were outputting, in other words, by comparing runners and walkers who were using relatively equal amounts of energy in their exercise, the results were nearly equivalent. So if you prefer walking to running, or you have a health condition that prevents you from running, as long as you are expending the equivalent amount of energy, you get the same benefit. This means you’ll have to walk longer; researchers estimate about twice as long as the runners.
And on the mental side, a 2014 research study from Stanford University found that walking increases creative output by as much as 60% by opening up the free flow of ideas. Researchers also found that a ten-minute walk is just as effective as a 45-minute workout in relieving anxiety symptoms. This was especially powerful when participants walked in nature. [See IF Insider No. 28 on Restorative Environments and Intermittent Fasting.]
Ok so now you can be reassured that walking is a great exercise. So, just how much walking should you be doing? I think this depends on your goals.
Let’s talk for a minute about exercise step monitors like the Fit Bit - this has everyone trying to complete the 10,000 steps a day recommendation you see all over the place. But just where did this number come from?
The number seems to have come from a trade name given to a pedometer sold in 1965 by a Japanese company called Yamasa Clock. The name was “Manpo-kei '' and is translated as 10,000 steps meter and seems to have stuck and has even made its way into the FitBit target. So the 10,000 steps are not based on any science.
More recent research from Harvard Medical school showed that, at least for women, about 4,000 steps a day is enough to significantly lower the risk of death. The more steps you walked above that, the lower the risk, but it leveled off at around 7,500 a day with no additional benefits seeming to accrue above that number.
In general, though, for the greatest cardiovascular benefit, you want to be doing something that is known as HITT or high-intensity interval training, where you do a much shorter workout, but you increase the intensity in spurts of between 30 seconds to 3 minutes and then rest and recover for the same amount of time. The great thing about HIIT training is that you can adapt it to walking, running, the Peleton, or any cardio exercise.
One of the easiest ways to do this is with PACE walking.
Dr. Al Sears, a Florida physician and one of the first doctors to be board-certified in anti-aging medicine, was way ahead of his time when he developed his PACE walking routing or Progressive Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion. Dr. Sears says that when you do long-duration exercises like aerobics and cardio, you burn fat during your workout, which sounds good at first. But he says this then sends a message to your body that you need a reserve of fat available for the next time you do long-duration exercise.
So this sets you up in a self-defeating cycle that ensures that your body makes more fat every time you finish exercising. With PACE, the sessions are relatively short, from as little as 12 minutes, and they never last more than 20 minutes, meaning your body never has a chance to burn fat during exercise. During PACE, your body burns carbs from skeletal muscle tissue.
This depletion of carbs from your muscles triggers what Dr. Sears calls your “afterburner.” After you finish your PACE session, your body will burn fat to replace the carbs it just used and will continue to burn fat for up to 24 hours after you finish… even while you sleep. This was demonstrated in Dr. Sears's lab and by researchers at Quebec’s Laval University.
So the obvious question is, can you or should you combine a high-intensity interval training program like PACE with IF: from what I can find, it seems clear that you can as...
Most people have more than enough stored glycogen in their muscles, even when fasted, to do a short and intense workout without eating beforehand and...
Some studies show that a HIIT workout in a fasted state helps to release more fat cells AND burn those fat cells more efficiently.
So, this is how to do PACE:
The key to success with this...you want to begin slowly. Actually, you’ll be walking at a very relaxed pace and you will alternate this relaxed walking with faster walking and work up gradually to 20 minutes.
On Day 1, you will warm up by walking at a comfortable pace for 2 to 3 minutes, timed on your watch or smartphone.
Then you want to gradually pick up that pace until you walk faster, like you are late for an appointment. Walk at this faster pace for a minute or two.
Then, and this is critical, you want to rest and recover...not by stopping but by slowing down your pace until you completely recover with your breathing and heart rate. This marks one complete cycle.
You may not be able to do more than this one cycle on the first day, or you may be able to do two or three cycles of this relaxed walking alternating with faster walking.
How often should you do this? Every other day or at least three times a week, and you’ll gradually add in more cycles of relaxed walking and fast walking till you get up to 20 minutes. No need to go longer than this!
As you do this regularly, I think you will be quite surprised at how quickly you will make progress, and it is going to start to get easier and easier to walk faster and faster. As your cardiovascular conditioning improves, at some point, you will likely just naturally begin to jog or run when the timing calls for faster walking.
But don’t forget...the key to success is the periods of rest and recovery between high-intensity periods of walking or running. So slow down in between until your breathing and heart rate recovers before you begin the next cycle. Then simply add cycles of this relaxed walking alternating with fast walking or running until you exercise for a full 20 minutes. That’s it!
One more thing: When you reach the point where you are doing 20 minutes of exercise and that 20 minutes is composed of 3 or 4 cycles, you can gradually increase the amount of exertion you are putting into each cycle. So you might be at only 30% capacity in the first cycle, then increase the intensity to 50 percent in the second cycle, then 75 percent in the third cycle, and on the fourth and last cycle, you go all out and do your max.
So, now you have a way to exercise that is very efficient, takes no more than 20 minutes to complete and is very easy on your joints.
References
Lee I, Shiroma EJ, Kamada M, Bassett DR, Matthews CE, Buring JE. Association of Step Volume and Intensity With All-Cause Mortality in Older Women. JAMA Intern Med. 2019;179(8):1105–1112. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0899
Oppezzo, M and Schwartz, DL. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2014, Vol. 40, No. 4, 1142–1152. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0036577
Why It Matters
“But the beauty is in the walking…we are betrayed by destinations.”
~ Gwyn Thomas (1936 - 2016) - Welsh poet and academic, Gwyn Thomas was the second national poet of Wales, holding that role between 2006 and 2008. He published 16 volumes of poetry and translated the Mabinogion, a compilation of the earliest British prose stories, from Welsh into English.
What We Are Reading 📚
With each issue, we bring you a short blurb on what we are currently reading or watching, including books, articles, podcasts, videos, movies, and research papers of value.
Denise - Elizabeth Cottrell, a friend and colleague to us, just published a much-needed book for these digital times… Heart Spoken: How to Write Notes that Connect, Comfort, Encourage, and Inspire. She’s long been an advocate for handwritten notes, and this wonderful book provides examples and stories about the power of taking a few minutes to jot down a few words to connect with people important to you.
Ellen - Professor Bradford Keeney, Ph.D., is known for his work among the Kalahari Bushmen, the keepers of the world’s oldest living culture. His book, The Bushman Way of Tracking God: The Original Spirituality of the Kalahari People, presents their ancient oral spiritual traditions through twelve original mysteries, including the direct downloading and absorption of sacred knowledge. An original and illuminating book!
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