CHAPTER 8
Walking: Circulating Your Mind and Body
“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”
—John Muir
In his bestselling book Blue Zones, Dan Buettner identifies commonalities between the daily rituals, habits, and lifestyles of the people around the world who live the longest and with the greatest vitality. One thing they all share is walking outside. In his research for the National Geographic series that eventually formed the basis for his book, Buettner found that Sardinian shepherds walk five miles a day up and down steep hillsides, the most of any of the Blue Zones inhabitants.1
The links between frequent walking, longevity, and quality of life aren’t limited to Buettner’s project. Recent findings from the American Cancer Society’s widespread study of 140,000 people showed that those who walk at least six hours per week have a significantly lower risk of developing respiratory disease, cancer, and cardiovascular complaints. And just two hours of walking per week moved the needle on all three diseases in a positive direction.2 Clearly, one of the easiest ways to live longer and more healthfully is to simply take a daily stroll (ideally outside in nature if you have access).
Craig Stanford states in his enlightening book Upright that the current structure of the human body would not exist had our ancient ancestors not literally stood up for themselves. “The modern architecture of the spine, pelvis, feet, and hands, and even nervous and circulatory systems, follows directly from the conversion from quadrupedalism to bipedalism,” Stanford asserts.3
He goes on to identify three major benefits of becoming bipeds: the ability to travel long distances to search for food, more successful hunting of prey, and the capacity to carry children, weapons, and tools. These factors formed the bedrock for a fundamental social shift, whereby our forebears not only hunted and foraged far and wide, but also came into contact with other tribes, discovered new lands, and conquered both.4
OK, history lesson over. We’re done recapping millennia of human development; what’s the relevance of all this for us today? Simply put, along with breathing, walking is one of the most fundamentally human things we can do and deserves our attention, with a caveat: All walking (and breathing) is not created equal.
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF WALKING
All this “walk more” stuff sounds great and all, but what if you’re a person who tends to get knee or hip pain after walking for any extended period of time, as though there’s a friction fire happening between your joints? Or perhaps you get tired quickly and feel as though your legs are filled with lead while you watch kids elastically bounce by. What is this elastic quality of movement?
These springy folks are all accessing their built-in elastic recoil qualities during movement. Let’s say you set out for a walk or run. The very first step you take going from zero to one uses the most energy because of the need to overcome inertia and transition from being stationary to in motion (sounds a lot like creating momentum in starting a new healthy habit). Once you’re on the move, notice what your arms and hips do. As you get into the rhythm, your opposite arm and hip pull away from each other on each step (in fancy speak, this is called contralateral motion). Imagine you had a rubber band connected from each of your shoulders to the opposite ankle that wrapped down both the front and back of your body. Each step you take lengthens those bands to spring you back in the other direction. After you’ve started the process of loading your internal stretchy bands (primarily tendons, but they also include muscles, ligaments, and connective tissues), they sling you back into the next step in large part via the stored energy from the previous step.5 Pretty clever design, right?
Think of your musculoskeletal system like strings of a guitar: Each step you take is a strumming of the chords. If the chords are aligned and tuned, the body plays with harmony. If any single string is too tight, loose, long, or short, the song you play in the world will sound a little bit off. The cacophony of imbalance translates biologically to a whole host of compensatory patterns—joint pain, higher stress levels, discomfort in your own body, trouble with self-expression, increased likelihood of injury, etc.
If your strings are slightly out of sync for walking with optimal efficiency, that’s OK, there’s hope! Start using these fundamental self-care practices to bring them back into balance and you’ll begin to feel more connection. Feel free to visit www.TheAlignBook.com for detailed video instructions on these techniques and more!
SELF-CARE FOR BETTER WALKING
Ankle Mobilization (with Band)
Your ankle mobility is key to a successful gait pattern, hip mobility, and spinal health. If there is restriction in the ankle, it will block the hip from extension (moving backward while walking), causing problems through the whole body. Attach the Align Band to a door (or whatever you have handy) as low to the ground as you can and wrap the band around the front of your ankle. Walk yourself away from the door to create tension in the band, and step away with your opposite foot, putting you in a traditional runner’s stretch while using the band to decompress the ankle joint. Keep the back heel on the ground the whole time to lengthen the posterior muscles of your leg and foot. Hold for approximately ninety seconds on each ankle, and feel free to use the techniques mentioned in Chapter 3 such as Contract-Relax.
Lunge (with Band)
Raise the door anchor of the Align Band to just above hip height and wrap the band around the hip on the forward-stepping leg. Step away from the door to create tension in the band and step your front foot about three or four feet away from the back or until you feel a stretching sensation in the back hip. Follow the same lunging principles mentioned in Chapter 6. Once you are in the lunge, you can raise your arms overhead and rotate your torso to the opposite side of the back leg to create more of a stretch through the hip and torso (optional to pass the band around the back stepping leg as well for greater focus on deeper hip extension). Hold for approximately thirty seconds and switch legs, remembering to breathe.
Banded Quad Stretch
Bring yourself into lunge position with your feet about two or three feet apart and drop your back knee down onto a pillow or cushion. Wrap the Align Band around the back foot and use it pull your knee into flexion, lengthening the front of the hip and quadriceps muscles. Lightly pull upward on the band to create a deeper stretch, and remember to breathe. Hold this position for about ninety seconds and alternate, using the Contract-Relax technique mentioned in Chapter 3.
Thoracic Spine Mobilization (with Band)
This is one of my favorite spine mobility techniques (shown opposite). Face the door and place the door anchor at heart level. Pass the band around your spine at that same height. Walk yourself backward until you feel moderate tension in the band creating a pull forward on your thoracic spine. Raise your arms overhead with your thumbs facing backward and feel your breath pushing outward against the tension of the band. Squat as deeply as is comfortable while maintaining a long, neutral spine, and begin slowly twisting your torso to the left and right. Hold on each side for about the length of a full breath. Alternate sides five times or as much as feels good for you!
Now that we’ve explored the physical facets of walking, we’re about ready to move on to the cognitive component. Taking a walk isn’t just good for your body, but can also be enriching for your mind.
I’M WALKING, YES INDEED, AND I’M TALKING
So sang blues legend Fats Domino, and his words still ring true over half a century later. Fast-forward fifty years and switch from the swamps of the Louisiana bayou to the brush of Silicon Valley, and we find Steve Jobs in his trademark black turtleneck strolling across Apple’s California campus, deep in conversation with the company’s design guru Jony Ive. What could they be discussing? Perhaps the design of the click-wheel iPod, iPhone, iPad, or iSomething that was soon to take over our lives.
Jobs realized early on in his second stint at Apple that holding meetings in his office or a conference room made him feel like a caged lion. So he started making just about every exchange with his colleagues and minions a walking one. Though, sadly, he didn’t live to see it, Jobs worked closely with the architects who designed the new Apple headquarters to create the infinite, walking-friendly loop at the heart of the $5 billion campus. And perhaps just as meaningfully, Jobs was adamant that his legacy should be found not only in gloriously simple electronic devices, but also in the 9,000 drought-tolerant trees (he consulted with an arborist, as one does), myriad plants, a walled garden, and a meadow—all in place before any employees moved into their new work digs.6
ALIGN YOURSELF
Seize every opportunity to bust out of those PowerPoint-afflicted meeting rooms and take your back-and-forth with your coworkers outside. Second, be intentional about where you’re walking, listen actively, and enjoy natural pauses when your conversation ebbs, rather than trying to fill every second with talking.
A WALK TO REMEMBER
An important and unsung benefit of walking that typically strides under the radar is its ability to improve memory consolidation and recollection. If you’ve ever taken a walk to clear your head or have had a “Eureka!” moment when out taking a stroll, you’ll know what I’m referring to. A study published in the American Journal of Health Promotion concluded that those subjects who walked for fifteen minutes at a moderate pace before a learning exercise encoded the lesson more effectively than the ones who didn’t, as was shown by their greater recall when tested later.7
The connection between taking a walk and enhancing memory also extends to preventing or even reversing age-related mental decline. A Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper compared three groups of people ages fifty-five to eighty who had previously lived sedentary lifestyles. One group walked for forty minutes three times a week, the second did yoga, and the third performed band-based resistance training exercises. When studying scans of all three groups, the scientists discovered that the walking group had undergone a positive neurological change: Their hippocampuses had grown by an average of 2 percent.8
While a small percentage, this actually has big implications, as the hippocampus is responsible for memory formation and recall. (Fun fact: The word “hippocampus” is derived from the Greek hippokampus: hippos, meaning “horse,” and kampos, meaning “sea monster,” because the structure resembles a seahorse.)9 The researchers stated that the six months of thrice-weekly walks had reversed age-related memory loss by one to two years.10 Another study at the University of British Columbia found similar results when the 120 minutes of brisk weekly walking was divided into just two sessions.11
ALIGN YOURSELF
If you’ve got a big test or presentation coming up, or anything for which you’d like your mind especially sharp, take a brief, mid-paced stroll beforehand. Combine this with walking at a rapid clip for at least two hours total each week. While you’re at it, toss some dance moves and music in there for bonus brain juice.
SEEKING SPIRITUAL CONNECTION
“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”
—Buddha
For millennia, people across all faith traditions—including those with a faith in science—have benefited from starting each day with a thoughtful walk. I felt the profound impact of walking with intention while staying at a Vipassana Meditation Center near Joshua Tree, California, with nothing to do between sessions sitting on a cushion other than taking a walk around the desert path they had formed for meditators. I felt a profound sense of connection with the unspoiled landscape, which, despite its dryness, has a haunting beauty that’s all its own. There is magic in every step, no matter the environment; we just tend to miss it when we live all the way up in our heads so far from the ground.
In his bestselling book The Rise of Superman, Steven Kotler explores the way that extreme athletes, most of whom are performing their feats in the outdoors, are able to readily access flow regularly. Yet it’s not just the Tony Hawks, Laird Hamiltons, and Paige Almses of the world who can find flow in nature—it’s accessible to the rest of us mere mortals, too. Why? Because the great outdoors contains by its very nature (pun intended) three of the main flow state triggers: novelty, complexity, and variability. And you don’t have to be going over a waterfall, BASE jumping off the side of a mountain, or towing into a seventy-foot wave to access such triggers. In fact, the simple act of taking a walk by yourself, going on a bike ride with a friend, or hiking with your family can put you in a state of deep and satisfying embodiment in which time flies and you’re at your most creative.
Such outside immersion also has lasting positive effects once you head back indoors. A study by Dr. Chuck Hillman at the University of Illinois used fMRI imaging to compare the brains of two groups. One group did twenty minutes of seated meditation, while the other took a twenty-minute walk. While the scans of the post-meditation brains showed an uptick in activity in several regions, the post-perambulation brains were lit up like a July Fourth fireworks display.12 It’s no wonder, then, that many creative people, from Charles Dickens to Beethoven to Aristotle, swore by taking a daily walk. It literally ignited their minds, and it can do the same to stoke your creativity, too.
ALIGN YOURSELF
If getting into a flow state is your goal, release the idea of multitasking. Try to find a time in your day that comes either right before you’re typically at your most productive so you can amplify this output, or use mindful walks to give you a boost during lulls. If you’re an early bird, see if you can carve out space for a silent, solitary walk some mornings. More of a night owl, or somewhere in between? Find a time in the afternoon where you can take a break in your day to walk. Resist the temptation to pull out your phone—there’s nothing calming or sacred about cruising your (anti)social media feeds, and you’ll be amazed at what you start to hear when you’re not using earbuds or headphones to create your own isolation chamber.
GET LOST!
I mean that with the utmost respect. Every once in a while, make time in your life for a good old-fashioned wander. You might want to leave the GPS/smartphone/fitness tracker at home (or at least in your pocket) and try to find your own way. While there is benefit to using a map and compass (it’s a skill, after all), even those hearty wilderness and urban explorers who’ve been doing it awhile eventually progress to a more independent version, whereby they just head out and see where they end up.13
“But why would I try to get lost?” I hear you ask. Well, you wouldn’t, not exactly. Rather, you’d just start to reclaim some of that inbuilt directional sense that’s hardwired into us as a survival instinct, rather than always abdicating your route planning to Siri. I’m not making this up. A McGill University experiment found that people who navigate spatially had more activity in the hippocampus than those who relied on a stimulus-response method (like using their smartphone’s navigation tool).14
ALIGN YOURSELF
If you’re planning to go somewhere and are likely to revisit soon, try to memorize the route or use landmarks and street signs to figure out how to get there and back. You can always bring your phone or fire up in-car GPS if things go awry and your poor, atrophied hippocampus fails to see you right. But going back to a paper map occasionally might be a good, brain-stimulating halfway house between finding your own way and letting your nav do all the work for you. This is because, said McGill University’s Veronique Bohbot, making sense of that old road atlas “is difficult, it’s complicated, it’s demanding.”15 All the better for your brain.
TAKING THE ROAD LESS FLATTENED
“I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”
—Henry David Thoreau
From city sidewalks to office corridors to those moving walkways in airports (I actually quite enjoy those things), we rarely encounter any kind of gradient or texture when we walk. Plus, these flat surfaces are also hard, which is one of the reasons road runners insist on putting an inch or two of cushioning foam between their feet and the pavement they pound, effectively muting one of the most potent input channels in the human body.
So what’s the big deal? Well, at the risk of being repetitive, the human foot was not designed to be locked into super-cushioned shoes with chunky heels, arch supports, “motion control” features, and all the other gimmicks companies have told us are essential. We also weren’t built to stick to featureless paths that don’t offer any kind of stability challenge to our thirty-three joints. Because we’ve coddled our feet too much, they’ve become weak and immobile, leading to millions spent each year in podiatry offices, and contributing to the billions spent annually on low-back pain.
The cure? Seek out inclines and declines that are challenging to the feet and ankles, go diagonally or in a zigzag pattern across hills rather than straight up and down them, and head off-road whenever possible. Walk barefoot on the beach, in grass, and on other soft natural surfaces, which will have the dual benefit of strengthening and mobilizing your feet. If you don’t have access to a safe public area for walking sans shoes, use your backyard if you have one. Shed your socks when you’re walking around the house. When you have to wear shoes, go for a pair with a thin, flexible midsole with no more than four millimeters heel-to-toe drop, as these will be best for your feet. Forgo flip-flops, though: Keeping them on your feet requires you to overengage your toes, which will only make you tighter and less mobile (sandals with heel straps are fine). Leonardo Da Vinci wrote, “The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” While my gnarly toes don’t deserve a display in the Tate Modern, binding them up in clunky shoes and lurching around on concrete is not what they were made for. It’s time to set your feet free!
ALIGN YOURSELF
Natural movement expert Katy Bowman recommends seeking out walking routes that require you to leave well-beaten paths and crunch through leaves, ford streams, and clamber over fences. She also suggests shedding your shoes whenever possible so you get real-time feedback from your feet, which have more nerves per square inch than any other body part.16 If you are going to wear shoes, choose a brand like Joe Nimble, Vivo-Barefoot, or Lems, which make flexible options with minimal heel-to-toe drop and toe boxes wide enough to give your feet some breathing room—bunions, hammer toes, and all.
SENSORY DEPRIVATION
A point rarely spoken of in relation to the endemic issue of low-back pain and injury is the sudden sensory deprivation of our feet in recent history. Your feet are massively represented on the sensory cerebral cortex, along with the eyes, ears, nose, hands, nipples, and genitals. Your feet—along with these other super-sensitive body parts—happen to stem embryologically from a common location referred to as the Wolffian ridge. When you go barefoot or wear minimal shoes with thin soles, your feet receive micro-feedback from the ground about the density, curvature, gradient, and other elements of the surface you’re interacting with underfoot. This allows you to make tiny adjustments to your balance and posture that are appropriate for your environment.
However, in the past few hundred years we’ve taken to putting layers of foam and rubber under our feet, cutting them off from the connection to the ground and the subtle recalibrations a bare foot would make moment to moment. As a result, our feet are weaker, less mobile, and less sensitive than they have been at any point in human history. Air soles, motion-control plates, and arch supports might seem cool in shoe ads, but they’re silencing the rich sensory feedback that the 7,000 nerve endings in each foot should be providing to the brain and nervous system every time we make contact with the ground. Depriving your feet of the natural stimuli that they have received for millennia may also very well be directly associated to low-back issues experienced by the majority of Westerners. Phillip Beach wrote extensively about these connections in his book Muscles and Meridians and said this about the back-foot connection:
The most vulnerable spinal segments are found at the junctional area of the lumbar spine and the sacrum (L4/L5 and S1), which send their sensory spinal nerves down to the soles of the feet, i.e., the most vulnerable segments are driven by the most information. This is important. The small muscles of the low back are thus segmentally related to the soles of the feet. Information drives all systems, so here we have a sensory platform devoted to the most vulnerable region of the low back. Shoes, from this perspective, are sensory deprivation chambers that cut down the raw information we need to stand and walk in our precarious upright manner.”17
ALIGN YOURSELF
Grab a few good size rocks to have around your yard to walk and balance on each day. Be barefoot at home—inside and outside—whenever you can. Take advantage of nature when you have the opportunity and be quicker to pop your shoes off when you walk past a grassy patch. Embrace being the weirdo balancing on the root of a tree barefoot. You can tell people you’re rehabbing the years of desk-sitting trauma you experienced in grade school.
CIRCULATION STATION
You may have heard the catchy sound bite, “Sitting is the new smoking,” credited to Dr. James Levine in the book Get Up! While this might initially seem a bit alarmist, it’s not actually inaccurate, but neither does it tell the whole story. Our largely seated lifestyles have perpetuated an obesity epidemic, sent rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease soaring, and robbed us of our vitality, this is true. As discussed in Chapter 4, a gaping hole in this conversation is the way in which you sit—it’s not as much about the quantity as it is the quality and the micro-movements in between. Instead of being glued to chairs, the simple acts of spending more time eating, working, and hanging out on the ground, along with walk breaks in between, are a primary solution to the symptoms associated with the so-called sitting epidemic (see Chapter 4 for the specifics on how and why).
A core dilemma with excessive chair sitting is that it puts your lymphatic system, which is meant to pump out waste products, into sleep mode; unlike the cardiovascular system, which pumps automatically via the heart, the lymphatic system requires movement. University of Utah researchers recently sought to find a minimum effective dose for during-the-day movement. They discovered that people who walked as few as two minutes every hour reduced their risk of premature death by a third.18
This isn’t a shocker, as the lymphatic and immune systems are best mates, like Batman and Robin, for keeping you healthy. The Columbia University Medical Center noted that people who replaced thirty-five minutes of sitting with physical activity of any kind or intensity cut their mortality risk by up to 35 percent.19 All this talk of death getting you down? Well, it shouldn’t: The good news from both these studies is that all you need to do to stay alive longer is to stand up and get moving more often with the simplest of all exercises: walk.
ALIGN YOURSELF
While it’s great to take an extended walk each day, try to fit in micro-movement, too. Can’t remember to get up from your desk or couch and walk around, do some jumping jacks, or get outside? Set a timer! Then download an app like Move, Stand Up!, or Stretchy to remind you, or use your fitness tracker for the same purpose.
Alignment Assignment
For the next thirty days, intentionally make more opportunities to go for walks and pay attention to the way it feels as you do so! Instead of meeting people for coffee, meet for a walk (feel free to grab a cup of coffee or tea and bring it along).
Try this mobility technique before you go to bed tonight as well. I refer to it as the Venus Fly Trap: Simply place the individual fingers of your right hand in between each toe on the left foot (the pattern of finger, toe, finger, etc., clasped together looks a bit like a Venus fly trap) and begin using your hand to stretch open the toes in all directions for about two minutes. Then switch to do the same with the left hand working with your right foot.
