From Your First Steps
You likely don’t remember the first steps you took as a tot. You likely were right around your first birthday and decided to pull yourself up and take those first shaky steps. Soon, you were racing around to the delight and annoyance of your parents.
How long it’s been between those first steps and today is likely decades in the making, but your steps are every bit as important now as back then.
Walking isn’t just a means of transport to get yourself between rooms or go check the mail. So many have forgotten the thrill that simply walking can bring. People will point to jogging or biking as better alternatives for health, but that really isn’t cut and dry better or worse.
Lets’s lay out 5 fast facts about walking vs jogging and then we’ll do the same for biking.
- Walking is great for almost all levels of fitness and ages. Whereas jogging requires much better fitness and can be harder on the back, hips, knees, ankles and feet.
- Walking allows you to take in your surroundings more thoroughly and enjoy the outside more. With jogging things are more jostled and gone much faster from your sight.
- Jogging burns more calories faster. Walking tends to allow your heart to stay in the healthier fat burning zone of 50-70% of your max heart rate while still burning decent calories per minute.
- Jogging you will reach a destination faster. Walking usually will leave you with more energy when you arrive.
- Odds of injury while walking is between 1 and 5%. While jogging ups the risk of injury to 20% minimum.
Now lets cover biking with 5 more.
- Biking requires more equipment to be purchased and maintained than walking.
- Walking tends to allow cyclists and drivers to see you for longer and therefore leads to less vehicular accidents.
- Biking may have to be learned and injury can effect your ability to balance on a bike.
- Walking has very few laws related to it compared to biking laws, restrictions and regulations which tend to differ greatly just town to town.
- You don’t have to store anything when you walk. With biking you always have to have a place to secure you bicycle.
I’m in no way bashing jogging or cycling. If you do those I’m happy for you and encourage you to keep it up. If you want to progress to being able to jog or bike more, walking is a fine way to build your endurance, leg muscles and lung capacity. There’s no reason you can’t mix it up and eventually do all three of these as your cardiovascular exercise.
I hope you found this info food for thought. Maybe it encouraged you to lace up your shoes and get back out there? Where will you walk today?
Can’t wait to see you strolling along.
Kimmie
Hey great post and thanks for the facts!
Finally a post about walking and its goodness! Usually there are so many posts and information about how jogging or other forms of vigorous exercise are good for you, most comparisons put down walking when in fact it too is healthy and beneficial!
Thanks again and have a great day!
Thanks! Walking is so often overlooked or considered not real exercise. I hope to change many minds about the wonder of walking.
With all the talk about getting a certain number of steps per day, do you have any suggestions for how many steps you should complete in a day? I have heard the number 10,000 thrown around a lot but wonder if this is a good number to go for. Also, any thoughts on the best types of shoes for walking? Realizing that everyone is different would like your opinion on a preferred brand you might suggest. Thanks. Dave
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the comment and questions.
As to how many steps 10,000 does get thrown around a lot. There really isn’t a one size fits all on that, though. Like pretty much everything else, it’s going to be individual. This number can range depending on one’s fitness level, age, step size and terrain. The recommendations I can find that seems most consistent is to aim for at least 3500 steps a day and attempt to get 5,000-10,000 at least 2-3 days a week.
Brands of shoes are generally as important as fit and support they offer. For example, if you have wide feet and wear average width shoes you likely will not be comfortable and could cause blisters, calluses and lack of motivation to continue walking.
I definitely will be doing more thorough explanations on these two topics in future posts.
Thanks again,
Kimmie