No Freaking BS

“Walk This Way! How to Optimise Your Stride and Focus Your Mind to Get the Most From Your Daily Stroll” is one of those agonizing self-help articles from The Guardian that are useful only if you suffer from severe OCD and think the rest of the world should be suffering right along with you. I don’t recommend reading it unless you are feeling so insanely good that you need to bring yourself down a notch or two just to get your feet back on Terra Firma. In short: What a bunch of freaking BS.

 

Consider:

 

First, instead of propelling ourselves forwards by pushing off with the back foot, like an ice-skater, we try to use our stepping foot to power us along. This is because sitting down too much has made our hip flexor muscles short and tight. The necessary adjustment is the subtle difference between stepping into a space (wrong) and pushing off from a space, which will recruit the right muscles up the backs of your legs. Use your glutes and you open up the core.

The second problem is … a passive foot strike. The movement provided by the joints in our feet offers suspension and balance but we often plod along flatly instead, leaving us compromised. That’s what causes knee discomfort. It can create slight misalignment of the back, stiffness of the shoulders.

The third thing to watch out for is letting your head hang forwards. Screens, reading and desk work have made this the default position, which is a bit of a disaster. When the head is slightly forward, the muscles of the upper back and the shoulders have to contract to hold it there. The shoulders come forward and can stiffen. Back mobility becomes restricted and you will not be able to rotate your spine from the hips.

Finally, our arms tend to hang awkwardly or we force them into tense, power-walk movements, when what they want is to dangle freely. If you get steps one to three right, this should happen naturally…. <There are> various drills to help correct these bad habits, such as measuring with your hand the gap between your bottom rib and your hip, and between your collarbone and your earlobe, and then adjusting your posture to lengthen those gaps.

Got all that? Goooood.

 

If you, like me, are just grateful to finally be getting back out under the wide open sky, all of that stuff can safely be ignored. I mean, there’s no sense turning the perfectly natural act of walking into the equivalent of a golfer bending over a putt with a bad case of the yips. Yeah, you heard me. And you know who you are, ya dang yippee putters.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. So get out there and walk, or putt, or whatever it is that floats yer boat. No need to try to look like an ice skater. And for God’s sake, DO NOT worry about the angle of your arms or your head. Passive foot strike? Fuggedabowdit! Just put one foot in front of the other and enjoy the scenery. You’ll be glad you did.  I know I am. And that’s no freaking BS.