Having difficulty getting started on a fitness routine? No local gyms? No money in the budget for managing your health, fitness, and overall wellness?

How about adding more walking into your day? Walk your neighborhood. Hike in the woods or local parks, or try “nature bathing,” a topic for another post. Climb stairs in your home, apartment, or at nearby malls, offices, and other businesses. The options are abundant if one is motivated. Other types of exercise might offer more benefits than walking and are perhaps more appropriate for specific body types and issues. However, walking is the most available form of exercise that most people are already doing daily, to some degree. Walking can be therapeutic for some as a way to manage stress and anxiety, a much-needed tool in our current hectic society.

Here is a step-by-step method that offers some of the psychological mechanisms that can help someone to become motivated to get started with a fitness routine. By implementing the Self-Efficacy Theory (SET) I encourage any individual’s belief in their ability to perform specific behaviors relative to personal fitness and well-being. With the goal of increasing an individual’s health (young and old alike) through physical activities, I suggest expounding upon this goal by using appropriate, safe, and effective methods, such as walking. Why not implement more walking into your day? Consistent walking has many potential health benefits. Walking can help to increase overall physical health and mental well-being, as can be seen in adults of all ages who walk regularly. Some communities offer organized group walks where people can join and see others in similar health being able to engage in regular physical activity.

Once an individual becomes engaged in more simple and easily obtainable goals of walking activities, they can begin tracking and recording walking sessions on a daily basis. As the person increases their consistency of walking, they can gradually increase the distance and/or amount of time walking. As the individual sees their own progress increase through self-recording, they can further increase their own goals and consequently begin to achieve mastery in their own ability to maintain their health. Later they may invest in a fitness tracker, which could encourage more self-mastery of the individual’s health goals. Fitness trackers like Fitbit or Apple Watch can offer the person other ways to track not only their walking but also heart rate and calories burned in the process of walking. By acknowledging and celebrating their own achievements of specific goals, the individual again is receiving a feeling of mastery in their own achievements helping to instill their confidence and determination to continue further with their program of walking.

After some amount of time walking regularly, an individual will most likely begin to feel and experience somatic or emotional responses as they may feel less emotional stress after walking. They may even begin to feel the “runners’ high” where endorphins are released into their bloodstream, thus giving them a sense of temporary euphoria. By adding in some additional activities such as gentle stretching or warmup exercises at the beginning and/or end of each walking session, an individual may be able to better manage physical soreness, muscle tightness, or even emotional stress. As a person improves their own health, loved ones may offer emotional and maybe physical support if needed. An individual then may also begin to feel that others do indeed care about their health and well-being. This can further help them to become more intrinsically motivated to continue their exercise program knowing and believing that they can do it on their own but have more support if necessary. I think that all of the constructs that I discussed from SET and also with the self-determination theory (SDT), will give an individual over a short amount of time, the tools that they need to have more self-control, agency, and autonomy over their own health and well-being.

The Physiology of Walking for Fitness

Walking and other weight-bearing activities that engage the muscles in the feet, calves, and thighs illicit a pumping effect that aids in moving blood back to the heart. Rhythmic patterns of relaxation and contraction of these muscles, in addition to the movement of the ankle and toe joints, help to increase venous return and help prevent blood pooling in the lower extremities. Lack of physical movement such as walking and an increase in sitting within our modern American sedentary lifestyle, are major factors that are contributing to the drastic decline in physical and mental wellness of our population within the last decades. More sitting for hours on end at work, behind computer screens, playing video games, and engaging with social media are the norm now. In past years physical activity was more prevalent whether from occupations, recreation, social interactions, or other reasons. A return to a more active lifestyle is what is necessary to get our nation back on track for better health and wellness, instead of harsh pharmaceuticals for all that ails us (a pill for every ill), and pursuing living a life without consequences. We are the architects of our own well-being and relative health and happiness.

The venous plantar plexus of the foot, the venous pump of the calf, and the thigh muscle pump all work together as part of the venous return mechanism, which sends blood back to the heart. The venous pump of the calf, also referred to as the calf muscle pump, is a very important component of this whole mechanism involving the relaxation and contraction of the calf and foot muscles during specific activities such as walking, climbing, exercising, and others. The primary muscles of the calf muscle pump are the gastrocnemius and soleus. This engagement of the calf muscles compresses the veins and pushes blood upwards against gravity. The venous plantar plexus is a bundle of veins found in the sole of the foot, having a primary function of collecting deoxygenated blood from tissues within the foot and moving it back upwards towards the heart. Other muscles in the foot, such as the flexor hallucis brevis, flexor digitorum brevis, and lumbrical muscles, influence toe flexion and extension and consequently help with increasing blood circulation. Both of these mechanisms within the calves and feet contribute to providing efficient blood circulation back up to the heart, as well as preventing blood pooling (edema) in the lower extremities.

Nose-breathing while walking also helps the body to produce nitric oxide (NO) a now well-known messenger molecule that is produced in the nasal cavity and other tissues throughout the body and more specifically in the veins as arteries. NO increases blood flow through dilation of the veins and arteries.

References:

Parts of the figure were drawn by using pictures from Servier Medical Art. Servier Medical Art by Servier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

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I teach and offer lectures about holistic health, stress management, qigong, tai chi, baguazhang, meditation, phytotherapy (herbs), music for healing, self-massage, and Daoyin (yoga).

I look forward to further sharing more of my message by partnering with hospitals, wellness centers, VA centers, schools on all levels, businesses and individuals that see the value in building a stronger nation through building a healthier population. I also have hundreds of FREE education video classes, lectures and seminars available on my YouTube channel at:

https://www.youtube.com/c/MindandBodyExercises

www.MindAndBodyExercises.com

www.Amazon.com/author/jimmoltzan

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Jim Moltzan

407-234-0119