I have been teaching people to walk correctly for a number of years now and people still look at me cross-eyed when I share that.
This remains why many of my clients are people who need pain relief and have not found it on all the traditional roads to wellness.
I get the occasional person who sees themselves on a wedding video and wakes up to the need to move differently but for many, I am a place of last resort. Obviously, I would like to see that change.
It makes perfect sense to me that walking correctly can help with pain relief but for some reason, this doesn’t occur to everybody.
But no one, and I do mean no one, thinks that walking is bad for you.
A blog in the Times yesterday from the Science of Fitness writer Gretchen Reynolds (who I would love to get in touch with if anyone has a contact) titled Why a Brisk Walk Is Better starts with:
Walking, fast or slow, is wonderful exercise. But now a first-of-its-kind study shows that to get the most health benefits from walking, many of us need to pick up the pace.
I have no problem with the piece though I particularly like the comments that go after one of my favorite issues with so many pieces on the benefits and negatives of so many exercise articles—correlation is not causation.
What about walking correctly?
But that aside, this article and almost every article on walking—and needless to say I read a lot of articles on walking—says nothing about walking correctly.
What else do people not care about doing correctly? Oh yeah, breathing which I have been writing about all week.
These unconscious physical actions tend to get short shrift when it comes to technique.
Walking correctly is essential to making the most of walking as an exercise. Many people go through life without walking correctly and get away with it but that isn’t necessarily a reason not to learn how to do it well.
With that, I’ll return to the title of the post. Walking correctly can help with pain relief.
Walking in and of itself is good for you but it can make things worse if you suffer from pain or are recovering from injury. Walking correctly is a way to help you age gracefully and recover from pain and injury issues.
The body is designed to be self-healing if used well, and walking is a key component of using the body as designed. I
know it might sound goofy that you should learn to walk but five years later I can tell you with confidence that learning to walk correctly can change your life for the better.