Fitness Made Simple!Is walking your only workout?

GUEST COLUMN: Dr N Prabhudev

Bengaluru Express
Bengaluru, Oct 9:

Is walking alone – an enough exercise?
Urgent wake-up call for India! The Lancet estimated that 101 million people in India are and about 315 million have hypertension. Over 60% of India’s adult population could be unfit by 2030- WHO Lancet study! Around 31% of adults worldwide – 1.8 billion people, do not meet the recommended activity levels! The WHO recommends adults engage in at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate aerobic activity, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, per week!
Our body demands more to stay strong and functional. Walking doesn’t specifically target your core. It neither answers abdominal adiposity! It doesn’t provide enough resistance to prevent muscle loss or age-related bone density decline. Walking alone does not improve core stability, or train balance, all of which become more important with age. You need strength training to maintain those aspects of health!
In a society that invites us to move less and less with cars, elevators, and escalators, the objective should be to exercise—and, to do strength training. Walk and work out – can subtract up to 10 years from biological age!
For Many, Walking is a sole workout because it fits into their daily routine, it is easy to do and it requires almost nothing else! Of course, any physical activity is better than none. “But you don’t get the same benefits as with workouts! The ideal, instead, is to combine both—Walk and resistance training!
Aiming for 7,000–10,000 steps daily is a good starting point. In walking, calorie burn is around 100 calories per Kilometre for someone weighing 70 to75 kg! You may increase the calorie burn with the pace and inclination. Brisk walking at a rate of 30 minutes a day reduces cardiovascular diseases by up to 19%, reduces premature death by 30%!
“What is work out – ‘Work out,’ is not normal physical activities like walking or climbing stairs! It is walking and resistance training! 7 out of 10 people don’t – that’s 70% of the population merely walk with no strength training!
What is of utmost importance is keeping the body’s muscles and mitochondria healthy for as long as we live. The mitochondria are like little batteries that produce the energy that impact the vitality! “When the mitochondria work well, we feel strong; when they deteriorate, we feel fatigued. It’s also difficult to burn fat with only diet.
There is no miracle pill – The only “medicine” proven to improve mitochondrial function is exercise and especially strength training. As we age, we may wake up with energy, but feel exhausted by mid-morning. Thus, we must keep our mitochondria as healthy as possible. Within the muscle there are slow Twitch fibres and fast Twitch fibres— slow twitch fibres are responsible for prolonged efforts such as walking; fast twitch fibres are essential for power and speed.
As we age, the fast twitch fibres are the first to decline. Walking improves endurance, but it doesn’t stop the loss of fast twitch fibres. If you don’t train strength, you become sluggish. We see it in older people, who end up walking in short steps because they have lost those fibres. Strength training is the only way to keep them going!
We gain muscle until the age of 25, maintain it until the age of 35 and, from then on, we start to lose it slowly, accelerating from the age of 50, and even more at the age of 65. There are cases of people in their 70s who maintain the strength of someone sedentary in their 40s or 50s!
After all, what you don’t use, you lose. That goes for muscle too—and also for bones, the respiratory system, and the pelvic floor. “Strength training is an investment in health for the future. It reduces anxiety and it makes us feel better at all levels. In reality, a healthy body is a perfect body.
Strength training – the proper strength is the key. It’s not about doing it in excess; it’s about doing it right. The right dose is few repetitions, lots of recovery time, and, above all, not looking to fatigue. Many people think that, if they don’t get tired, they haven’t trained properly. It’s actually just the opposite. In strength, we’re not looking to exhaust ourselves, we’re looking for quality.
It’s best to focus on the legs. They are the largest reservoir of muscle mass in the body and also the quickest to deteriorate. In addition, the legs contain a lot of fast twitch fibres – so training them is vital. It’s better to do a few exercises well and repeat them a couple of times. Stop before fatigue sets in.
The six-minute endurance test involves walking as fast as possible for six minutes. Walking less than 500 meters indicates poor cardiorespiratory fitness; walking between 500 and 700 meters is acceptable; walking more than 700 is excellent.

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Chandrashekar G

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