Walk Two Miles and Call Me in the Morning

Walking is man's best medicine. Hippocrates

One. One. One. Two. One. One. Three. Four. One. One. One. One... That's the number of people in the cars that zoom past me on my daily walks. Most are big, high occupancy vehicles wheeling down the street with driver only behind the wheel. But lets be honest: Cars aren't going to disappear anytime soon. As much havoc as they wreak on the environment, think of the economic disaster that would ensue if they were to vanish tomorrow.

I consider myself lucky to not own a car. I'm fortunate to live in a place where work is a short jaunt and there are plenty of services nearby with others accessible by a bus or trolley ride. Where I live, it would be more of a hassle to drive to the grocery store rather than walking there and carrying the stuff back home. After all, people do pay serious bucks to schlep all kinds of things across parking lots during boot camp. Why not put it to use?

We spend the day driving from one box to the next. We leave the house (box) in the morning, get in the car (box), and drive to work (box). Then after work we drive (car box again) to the gym (box), and back home (box) again. We put the miles on our cars, but our legs don't get much action.



Walking is an integrating activity for our body: top to bottom, front to back, left to right. Without giving it much thought (if any) we put one foot in front of the other and away we go! It's a great way to burn calories, about 250 per hour. When you're on foot take long, thoughtful strides along with deep breaths. With age, those steps become shorter and shorter and soon we're not walking but shuffling down the street side-to-side. Lead with your pelvis, your center of gravity, rather than leaning forward with your chest. And as much as possible, keep your chin up glancing downward with your eyes rather than your entire head.

A teacher once said that walking was like dancing: sometimes you're in step, sometimes you're not. But practice and the beauty of it becomes apparent.

You're Sitting on Your Greatest Muscle-Building Asset

The glutes, quadriceps, and ham-strings burn a remarkable volume of gram calories while they are being trained. As a Palm Springs Personal Trainer I've directly observed the real-word benefits with clients: Those squats, lunges, and dead lifting sets take a substantial energy toll on the entire body but yield great results. Because your body works systemically (think about it functioning as a huge furnace), those tortuous leg exercises trigger an increase in your body's whole metabolism. That burn lasts long after the exercise is finished, too. It takes the body a couple hours to return to your typical metabolic state while still consuming gram calories at a higher than usual levels.

With these large muscles, you are sitting on your body's best fat-fighting resource: Your glutes and your legs – the two body parts that encompass the leading mass and fat-burning muscles on the skeleton. They're capable of fantastic bursts of energy but additionally call for sizable amounts of gram calories to make that occur. Muscle is vibrant, it's alive and needs to be fed. Fat, on the other hand, consumes very little energy. It is, after all, the form in which the body deposits excess energy, i.e., excess gram calories. By focusing on your large thigh muscles, you super-charge your body’s calorie burning capacity and also target those in which adding muscle-mass is easiest.

What's the implication? No excuses avoiding hard leg training. The possibility for muscular growth and transformations that leg training supplies for your whole entire body is too good to refuse. An effortless, twice-weekly training routine is to split your legs into front and rear. One day, focus the muscle in front of your legs, the other day, train the muscles on the rear of your legs. And if you're trying to develop a well-developed and shaped, beefy, muscular backside; do your lunges and squats! Try this training arrangement for 8 to 10 weeks and then switch it up.