Walking the Walk
“Every single thing our bodies do requires movement—initiated by our musculoskeletal system—to be performed with ease. Digestion, immunity, reproduction—all of these functions require us to move. You can eat the perfect diet, sleep eight hours a night, and use only baking soda and vinegar to clean your house, but without the loads created by natural movement, all of these worthy efforts are thwarted on a cellular level, and your optimal wellness level remains elusive”
Learn: A few years ago I was struggling with a number of issues, many of them caused by me developing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from a particularly bad relationship. At this point in time I had completed therapy for my PTSD but I was still in recovery and experiencing significant anxiety. I had also developed significant muscular pain in my hip that wouldn’t go away despite a number of different treatments including cortisone injection, acupuncture, ultrasound and lots and lots of physiotherapy. Combining anxiety and joint pain I wasn’t moving much and I had gained a significant amount of weight making me overweight. I wasn’t in a place where I felt big changes were possible. I couldn’t go on a diet as being hungry triggered my anxiety, I didn’t exercise, and truth be told, didn’t move very much at all. I was used to being a fairly active person but the joint pain had made me stop walking and taking the train to work and instead started driving. I used to do some exercise but that didn’t happen anymore. All in all, I was feeling rather rubbish.
But I didn’t want to feel that way. I wanted to do something, however small to feel better, to know I was on the right track. Looking at the research for all three issues there was one one “recovery tool” they all had in common. Walking.
Walking, and especially walking in nature, is a generally accepted way of improving a myriad of mental health issues including anxiety. If you live in the UK, just take a look at the NHS website for anxiety. If not in the UK, take a look at your local healthcare provider’s webpage or google “anxiety” and “walking” to find more information.
I did realise that my weight gain wouldn’t magically turn around just because I started walking, but I realised that it was going to be a step in the right direction (no pun intended!) and as I wasn’t going to go on a drastic diet, and I did at least try to improve my fitness a bit.
My biggest concern was my hip pain that didn’t allow me to move much, but I realised that this was really one of those times where I had to find the minimum that I could do, and do it consistently.
If you are not convinced of the need or benefit or walking, or feel it’s not for you, I strongly recommend that you read Katy Bowman’s Move your DNA. In this book Katy explains the science of the need for natural movement in an easy and engaging way and gives a lot of practical tips for those of us for whom movement are for one reason or another, just not happening.
Plan: Once I had made the decision to start walking I needed to figure out when, where, how often and how long. What would be my trigger and my reward?
The most important thing for me was that it was sustainable, that it didn’t trigger my hip pain and knocked me out for days afterwards. To this end, I decided not to put a minimum time or distance on my walks. As long as I put on my shoes and stepped out of my house I was allowed to count it as a walk. It turned out though, that when those shoes were on, I usually walked a bit longer than out the door and back again…! The key here was to really focus on my body instead of just pushing through (as I’m well known to do), to only walk as far as I could do with minimal discomfort.
I then decided to try walking after work. At the time, I worked some days in the office and some days from home and I found that coming home (from the office) or finishing work (working from home) was a good trigger.
Systemise: Taking a walk after work helped me process my day and made me more relaxed in the evening which was an unexpected reward. It wasn’t enough as a reward though, and neither was the “feel good” of taking a walk and despite trying to get my habit to stick I often felt too tired to be bothered.
I played around with making changes to my trigger (maybe I should walk in the mornings?) and with the actual habit (was it better to track the number of steps per day to spread out my walking?) but what finally made the habit take hold was when I found an additional reward. I feel quite silly writing this, but what made me start actually walking every day was a friend introducing me to Pokémon Go! Just in case there is someone not familiar with this game, it’s a mobile phone game based on walking around and catching Pokémon’s, and to do that you need to visit different places in your neighborhood, you get bonuses for the amount you walk and for walking and playing every day. Playing a game on my phone!! Without anyone judging me for sitting around playing on my phone! I want to go out and catch more Pokémon! This was a real turn around point for me as it gave me a reward strong enough in those early days to make me want to go out. Breakthrough!
Review: I have a habit tracker on my phone where I can enter habits I’m working on and make a simple tick for every day I do the habit and I entered “walk” as a habit to be performed once a day. I did struggle with myself what actually counted as a walk (if I went to the local shop, could I count it as “going for a walk” or if I went shopping with a friend and my feet were sore, could I say I had “gone for a walk”?!?). In the end I decided to be kind to myself, remembering that the best habit is the one you actually do, and decided that if I had my shoes on and walked further than the car, then I could count it as a walk. In those early days I rarely walked more than 15 minutes per day but that didn’t matter, the important thing was that I walked! I checked how I was doing in my tracker and very occasionally pushed myself out the door when I really didn’t feel like it (Pokémon or not!) and slowly but surely it became a habit.
Today, years later, I walk twice a day for an hour each most days (something I could only dream about when I started!). I can fit this in before and after work as I’m now working from home every day (a COVID initiated working from home that I’ve since made permanent) and I just don’t feel right if I don’t get my body moving a couple of times a day. I have swapped Pokémon for audiobooks and podcasts and I really look forward to this time as my treat. I still track my walking in my habit tracker but these days I also do my weekly “healthstyle” review (a term I’ve borrowed from Darya Rose and her book Foodist). What this means it that I take 5 minutes every Saturday, while I’m walking anyway, to think through how things have been going the past week in terms of movement and food and make plans for the week to come.
My goal hasn’t changed though. If I put my shoes on and walk further then my car then I count it as a win! And that still happens on the odd day I’m feeling really rubbish, but more often than not, those rubbish feelings start feeling a lot better as soon as I get out and start walking.
And what about all of my ailments you ask? I’m happy to report that they are all better, not just because of the walking and I will share other ways I’ve been working on them in other blog posts, but walking has been a real corner stone in my improvement.
Do you walk? Would you want to? Or do you have another kind of movement you prefer to get your daily movement dose? Share and let me know how you get on trying out different approaches to daily movement!