Increase health benefits on your daily walk
Photo by Tobi on pexels.com
Q: I try to walk at least 30 minutes every day. What can I do during the walk that might improve my health?
A: You can get even more health benefits by adding a few simple upgrades to your daily walk.
Your regular walking routine is already helping you maintain good balance. During your walk, the brain integrates information from your inner ear organs, vision and nerve endings and feelings in the feet, muscles and joints, all the way up the spine.
Walking at a brisk pace is a moderate-
intensity activity that makes your heart and lungs work harder. The exertion activates changes in your muscles, metabolism, blood vessels and brain that contribute to improved heart health.
If walking is easy for you, try making it a little harder to get even more practice and potentially get better at balancing. For example, during a walk you could periodically take about 10 steps walking heel-to-toe. The narrower your base of support when standing, the trickier it is to maintain your balance.
Other ideas: Turn sideways and take 10 side steps. Or keep walking forward, but turn your head slowly left and then right a few times in a row. Why? If you’re walking in a certain direction but turn and look in a different direction or aim your ears in a different direction, you’re not giving the usual visual or auditory feedback to the brain, which challenges your balance.
Walking offers an excellent way to add stress on our bones to keep them strong. Weight-bearing exercise is a standard way to strengthen bones, and walking is a weight-bearing activity.
Add weights
Weight lifting is also a good way to strengthen bones. You can combine the two activities for extra oomph by wearing a weighted vest or backpack on your walk.
Get a vest that allows you to adjust the amount of weight you’ll carry, such as a vest with removable weights. For example, start with 5 pounds. Keep adding another 2.5 pounds more every week or two, as long as your gait feels the same and you don’t experience any pain or soreness after wearing it.
Another way to make your heart work harder on a walk is by adding arm movements. About 10 minutes into a 30-minute walk, begin raising your arms up and down repeatedly in any way that feels comfortable — such as straight out in front of you, above your head or out to the sides.
You can also make your heart work harder by adding high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which involves brief bouts of strenuous exercise.
During a walk, that would mean periodically breaking into a run for about 30 to 60 seconds, doing push-ups or jumping jacks. The easier this becomes, the longer the high-intensity intervals can last.
Howard LeWine, M.D., is an internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. For additional consumer health information, see health.harvard.edu.
© 2024 Harvard University. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
