From The Body Ascent a series within The Ascent Within
There is something slightly strange about the way we talk about exercise.
Tell someone you’ve been to the gym for an hour and nobody questions whether you’ve exercised. Go for a run, complete a spin class or finish a hard workout and it clearly counts. Tell someone you’ve been for a forty-minute walk and there’s sometimes a temptation to add something afterwards, almost as though walking needs explaining. It was a brisk walk. There were plenty of hills. I did five miles. Anything to make it sound a little more legitimate.
Perhaps that’s because we’ve gradually come to associate exercise with effort. We expect it to involve sweating, aching muscles, elevated heart rates and preferably at least a little bit of suffering. If we finish feeling relatively comfortable, it can seem as though we haven’t really done enough.
Walking doesn’t fit particularly well into that version of fitness. Most of us have been doing it since we were toddlers. We walk around shops, across car parks and from one room to another without giving it any thought. There are no complicated techniques to learn, no membership required and no impressive equipment to buy. It is so ordinary that it’s easy to overlook what is happening every time we get up and put one foot in front of the other.
Maybe walking’s biggest image problem is simply that it doesn’t look extreme enough.
When Did Exercise Have to Hurt?
The fitness world has given us an enormous amount of useful information, but it has also created some peculiar ideas about what counts as worthwhile movement. We track calories burned, heart-rate zones, personal bests, steps, distance, pace and increasingly just about anything else a watch on our wrist can measure.
Those things can be useful and, for some people, genuinely motivating. The problem comes when the measurement becomes the definition of whether an activity was worthwhile. A walk that doesn’t leave you breathless begins to feel inferior to a workout that does, while taking the dog out hardly feels like exercise because you were going to do it anyway.
Yet our bodies aren’t particularly interested in whether an activity looks impressive. When we walk, our muscles contract repeatedly, our cardiovascular system works harder than it does when we’re sitting still and we use energy. Done regularly, that simple activity contributes to cardiovascular health, physical function and our overall activity levels.
Walking also has one enormous advantage over many more demanding forms of exercise: for most people, it’s relatively easy to recover from. You can go for a decent walk today and, rather than needing several days to recover, probably do it again tomorrow. That doesn’t make harder exercise unnecessary. It simply reminds us that intensity is only one part of the picture.
I think this becomes particularly obvious when you listen to how people describe their own activity. Someone might tell you, “I don’t really exercise,” and then casually mention that they walk the dog for forty minutes every morning, walk to the local shops and spend several hours gardening at the weekend.
They may not have a structured exercise programme, but describing them as inactive wouldn’t make much sense either. Formal workouts are useful, but they’re only one way of moving our bodies.
What a Walk Is Actually Doing
Walking is sometimes described as “just walking”, as though the body is barely involved. In reality, your legs, hips and core are working to move and stabilise you, while your heart and lungs respond to the increased demand for oxygen and energy. Pick up the pace or encounter a hill and those demands increase further.
There are useful metabolic effects too. After we eat, carbohydrates are broken down and glucose enters the bloodstream. When we move, contracting muscles can take up and use some of that glucose for energy. That’s one reason even relatively light activity after a meal can help reduce the size of the rise in blood glucose that follows eating.
You certainly don’t need to understand the finer details of glucose transport or metabolism to make use of that. Sometimes a short walk after dinner is simply a good habit.
Then there is the benefit of replacing sitting with movement. This is particularly relevant now that so much of modern life seems designed to keep us in chairs. We drive to work, sit at desks, drive home and eventually sit on the sofa. Even people who exercise regularly can spend large parts of the rest of their day barely moving.
This is where walking can complement rather than compete with structured exercise. Someone might train hard three times a week but still benefit from moving more during the many hours between those sessions. Walking to the shop, getting outside at lunchtime or taking ten minutes after dinner all contribute to the overall amount of movement in a week.
None of this requires a five-mile hike or a carefully planned walking programme. Much of the benefit comes from simply finding more opportunities to use the body rather than automatically choosing the option that requires the least movement.
The Walk That Changes More Than Your Fitness
The physical case for walking is strong, but focusing only on the body misses part of its appeal.
Most of us have experienced leaving the house with something going around in our head and returning with it feeling slightly different. The problem might still be there, but somehow it doesn’t seem to occupy quite as much space.
Part of that may simply come from changing our environment. Instead of staring at the same four walls or another screen, we’re seeing trees, houses, people, weather and whatever else happens to be around us. If we’re outside during daylight, we get natural light at the same time. We’re moving rather than sitting, and for a while we’re physically separated from whatever we were doing before.
Walking can also create something that has become surprisingly rare: a period when nobody is asking anything of us. Of course, we can immediately fill that space with a podcast, music or a phone call, and sometimes that’s exactly what makes a walk enjoyable. But there is something to be said for occasionally leaving the headphones behind and allowing the mind to wander. Thoughts can sometimes settle when we stop actively trying to solve them.
I wouldn’t pretend that going for a walk is a treatment for every mental health difficulty, because it isn’t. Complicated experiences deserve more respect than simply telling someone to get outside and exercise. But movement can form one useful part of looking after our mental wellbeing, particularly when it changes our surroundings, gives us some breathing space and briefly removes us from the constant stream of information competing for our attention.
That’s one of the things I like most about walking. The same half hour doesn’t need to have a single purpose. You can be moving your body, getting outside, giving your mind some space and simply enjoying where you are.
Where Walking Fits Into the Bigger Picture
Whenever something simple is recognised as beneficial, there seems to be a temptation to push the argument too far. Walking is no exception, and you’ll occasionally hear suggestions that it’s the only exercise most people really need.
I don’t think that’s particularly helpful either.
Walking does many things extremely well, but it doesn’t do everything. This becomes particularly important as we move through our forties, fifties and beyond.
Maintaining muscle and strength matters increasingly as we get older. Muscle isn’t simply about appearance or lifting heavy weights in a gym. We use strength every time we get out of a chair, carry shopping, climb stairs, pick something up from the floor or steady ourselves when we lose our balance. Keeping enough muscle and strength to continue doing those ordinary things comfortably becomes increasingly valuable with age.
Resistance training provides a type of challenge that ordinary walking doesn’t. That could mean lifting weights, using resistance bands, performing bodyweight exercises or any other activity that asks our muscles to work against meaningful resistance. More demanding cardiovascular exercise can also challenge the heart and lungs in ways that a gentle walk may not.
None of this diminishes walking. It simply puts it where it belongs as one valuable part of a bigger picture.
We don’t really need to decide whether walking or strength training is better. They do different jobs. Someone might walk most days, perform strength training a couple of times each week and occasionally do something that gets them properly out of breath. Another person might swim, cycle, garden, dance or play a sport they enjoy.
The exact combination will vary because people’s bodies, preferences and lives vary. The aim isn’t to discover the perfect form of exercise. It’s to build enough movement, strength and physical challenge into ordinary life that our bodies remain capable of doing the things we ask of them.
You Don’t Need to Turn Walking Into Another Job
There is one final trap worth avoiding. Once we discover that something is good for us, we have a remarkable ability to make it complicated.
Walking quickly becomes 10,000 steps. Then perhaps 12,000 would be better. Before long we’re checking our watches at nine o’clock at night and marching around the kitchen because we’re 684 steps short of whatever target we’ve set ourselves. I’ve certainly found myself looking at a step count and wondering whether a completely unnecessary wander around the house might somehow make the day healthier.
If tracking steps motivates you, there’s nothing wrong with that. It can be a useful way of noticing how much, or how little, you’ve moved during the day. But the number isn’t the purpose. The movement is.
A twenty-minute walk doesn’t suddenly lose its value because your watch says you haven’t reached a particular target. Neither does a day with 7,842 steps represent some sort of failure.
Perhaps a more useful starting point is simply to look at your existing day and notice where a little more movement could fit naturally. You might walk while making a phone call, go outside for ten minutes at lunchtime or take a short walk after dinner. Perhaps a nearby journey doesn’t always require the car. You could meet someone for a walk occasionally instead of automatically sitting in a café.
These aren’t revolutionary ideas, and that’s part of their appeal. They don’t require a new identity, an expensive membership or a dramatic overhaul of your routine. They’re small opportunities to move that can become part of normal life without demanding much attention.
A Simpler Way to Think About Exercise
I suspect one of the reasons walking gets overlooked is also one of its greatest strengths: it is ordinary. You don’t need to psych yourself up for it, learn complicated techniques or become fit enough before you’re allowed to begin. For many people, the starting point is simply opening the front door.
There will always be room for harder training, and there should be. Strength matters, cardiovascular fitness matters, and challenging ourselves physically can be enormously rewarding. Walking doesn’t need to compete with any of that.
Perhaps the more useful lesson is that health doesn’t only happen during the hour we’ve labelled as a workout. It is also shaped by what we do during all the ordinary hours around it.
The walk to the shops counts. The dog walk counts. Twenty minutes after dinner counts. Getting outside at lunchtime because you’ve spent the morning sitting at a desk counts. We don’t need to make walking more impressive than it is in order to justify doing it.
Sometimes looking after ourselves really can be as uncomplicated as putting on a pair of shoes and going for a walk.
A final thought
The Body Ascent isn’t about chasing perfect health or turning wellbeing into another full-time job. It’s about understanding the simple things that can help us feel stronger, healthier and more capable, then finding realistic ways to make them part of everyday life.
Thanks for reading,
Cally
Rise with clarity and confidence.
If this article has encouraged you to think differently about movement, I’d love to hear what walking looks like in your life. Is it exercise, thinking time, stress relief, somewhere you listen to music or podcasts, or simply a chance to get outside?
The Ascent Within is about health for mind and body, without the extremes.
If you’d like to explore the wider approach behind my work, The 4C’s Method looks at how Calm, Clarity, Control and Confidence can help us create meaningful, sustainable change in everyday life.