Forget the Gym: Walking Is the Superior Form of Exercise
Abandon your punishing fitness plan! For true physical and existential salvation, nothing beats a good walk, argues author Will Self
I am certainly not advocating civil disobedience in the pages of Men's Health, but if there's one thing that kept me fit, sane and healthy during the first lockdown of 2020, it was walking.
And should the worst happen and lockdowns become a semi-regular feature of the coming months, it's in the simple practice of pedestrianism that I know I'll find solace again.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Last spring, as infection levels rocketed and the numbers of people hospitalised, intubated and dying were all rising, I would set out for long walks on the empty streets of south London, where I live. In the government's "shield" category – by reason of being on chemotherapy for an incurable myeloid blood condition – I knew I'd encounter no one who would pose any threat to me, viral or otherwise, while I would scrupulously avoid coming into contact with the rare and fugitive souls I'd spot traversing the once-bustling but now eerily silent city.
The decision to walk contained just that soupçon of defiance necessary to convince me that while mass hysteria gripped the nation, I remained calmly autonomous. The physical activity during those chilly small hours was sufficient to maintain muscle tone and healthy posture, even if pounding pavement and parkland is no substitute for pumping iron.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
But it's in the overall promotion of that quality we've come to think of as "wellness" – in contrast to the apparent sickness of the very planet itself – that walking seems to come, ambling, into its own.
The Outside Advantage
I cycle to get around and have increased this since the pandemic, for obvious reasons. I do yoga from time to time, when my ageing frame begins to creak and groan. But I confess: going to the yoga studio is a stretch for me, while gyms have always filled me with an instinctive revulsion. You don't have to be a communist to appreciate the force of Marx's observation: "The worker does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker; but it takes machinery to give this reversal a technically concrete form." Well, we may not work on assembly lines in factories as much as formerly, but I can't help seeing the contemporary gymnasium, with its emphasis on training with machines, as a strange sort of nostalgia for that state: working out in lieu of… working.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
The great virtue of walking is that it requires nothing by way of equipment. There is no joining fee
There's this problem with the gym – then there's that hell described by Jean-Paul Sartre as "other people". I once visited Gold's Gym at Venice Beach in California, the legendary location for the film Pumping Iron (1977), which pulled competitive bodybuilding, preening and posing, into public perception. The gym's manager told me that the most important pieces of equipment in the entire establishment were the mirrors, and laughed indulgently (he was built like the proverbial well-constructed outdoor lavatory) at his clientele's, and his own, consummate narcissism. But for those of us who neither possess such a hardened body nor are desirous of building one, gyms can be intimidating places – intimidating, and expensive, too.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
During lockdown, people were doing sit-ups, press-ups and even lifting weights in parks and other open spaces, but as soon as the gyms reopened, many disappeared back indoors. I really cannot understand this. To me, the most bizarre sight in the world is someone on a running or cycling machine, rather than running, cycling, or, of course, walking. Most of us, I'd contend, spend too much time either looking at screens (both for work and leisure) or through them, as we commute to work, drive to the shop, or even drive to take exercise. The last of these seems to me another cosmic solecism – and as it's often the prelude to exercising inside, constitutes a doubling down on the denatured and technologically mediated nature of our contemporary existence. And, with the pandemic unabated, life for many of us has become still more desk-bound, the outside worlds of work, sociality and leisure all collapsing into two dimensions and 26-odd inches.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
The great virtue of walking as a serious pursuit is that it requires nothing by way of equipment or specialist kit except the comfortable and hard-wearing shoes you already possess. There are no joining fees to walk, and you certainly won't feel body-shamed by your fellow pedestrians, many of whom will be pensioners on their way to the shops. Walking is also by its nature spontaneous: you do it all the time, anyway, so why not simply increase the amount you do? The pensioners are strolling to the shops. So can you. And you can do it even if the shops are a lot further off. Which brings me to my main selling point for new-entrant walkers: its immediacy is what makes walking so appealing. There's no need to locate a venue; you simply get up and walk out whichever door is nearest. I'm fairly rigorous about this aspect of walking, and I think it's key to the success of the entire enterprise. Indeed, while I can just about accept driving to take a walk in a particularly beautiful or interesting place, for me, the really life-sustaining walks are the ones I take from wherever I happen to be.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
If I'm in the country, I walk in that countryside. If I'm in the city, I walk in that built environment. And if I'm in Selly Oak on a wet Sunday afternoon in January, then I take a walk in Selly Oak. Walking is the way I bring my mind and body together through being actively in the place I am, rather than trying to avoid it by travelling somewhere else, or blot it out by filling one or other of my senses with quite other environments.
The most conspicuous example of this is music, via headphones or car stereo, so as to make a soundtrack for the film of your life – which is really, when you think about it, creating a giant, imaginary screen around your experience of the world. I know, you're thinking, "But Selly Oak (or Southampton, or Selhurst, for that matter) is pretty boring on a wet Sunday afternoon in January." To which I can only reply with one of those exquisitely annoying parental formulations: if you're bored, it's because you're boring. And by "boring", I mean unwilling to take an interest in anything that doesn't immediately appeal to you.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Lost Connections
Let me reinforce this with an anecdote. I once went to Easter Island, the most remote inhabited island in the world and one of the most exotic and extraordinary places to boot. The friend I went with was not a walker – though he did have other virtues – but gamely agreed, in principle, to join me for some hikes. The first attempt I made to hold him to his promise was also the last. We had driven to the north end of the island, where there's an extinct volcano, Poike. It's an extraordinary sight: an eminence of some 370m, entirely covered in grass, but with two quartz-glinting granitic outcrops on its shoulder, like epaulettes on a military officer's tunic. We parked our hire car and began walking towards it – the giant, bright-green knoll, outlined by the deep ultramarine of the mid-Pacific Ocean. After no longer than five minutes, my companion – a famous artist – groaned: "I'm bored." And I struggled hard not to pick up one of the chunks of quartz lying in the grass and use it to bash his brains in.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Which is all by way of illustrating this point: you cannot come to walking expecting some sort of quick fix. This is the ultimate slow activity. Yet once you've attuned yourself to the leisurely progress you're making, you start to appreciate the extraordinary benefits. For one, as you're not on an A-to-B journey with a specific aim in mind, you really can forget about any reward associated with arrival – such as the endorphin hit beloved of our running brethren – and instead abandon yourself to the pleasures of transit itself. In a car, or even on a bike, the world's contours are ironed out for you, but on foot there's a direct correlation between your muscle movements and your senses. The play of the breeze, the sunshine (and, naturally, the rain) on your face and any exposed flesh; the swish of grasses and other herbage against your legs; the smells and the sights – the walker is constantly surveying the territory he moves through with a full 360° panoramic viewing.
Moreover, unlike anyone using mechanised transport, he also has – returned to him, as it were – the foreground, which for most, most of the time, is reduced to a blur. The walker, if he consents not to be bored, has returned to him those vestigial senses of exteroception (the dispensation of objects in the vicinity), proprioception (awareness of the dispensation of his own body), and even interoception – that hearkening to the movements of our internal organs that, for the most part, we repress.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
My walking isn't simply a leisure pursuit – it's transportation, entertainment, fitness and therapy
Furthermore, the car driver, the train and plane passenger – they all see the world around them as a series of detached views, but the walker is resolutely rooted in that world, his calves aching as he ascends a hill, his knees taking up the strain as he descends. I bumper stickerishly proclaimed above that it's the journey that matters for the walker, and that arriving brings no special reward, but there's at least one exception to this. When doing really long country walks – and I'm talking around 25 miles in a day – I find that just before I fall asleep that night, I'm visited with the most extraordinary reverie. I experience the entire day's journey over again: every stile I've climbed and stream I've leaped, the whorled windows of cottages I've peered into and the muddy furrows I've ploughed along.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
The first time this happened to me, I was overwhelmed. I had just done 25 miles out from central London and into the Essex countryside. There was the long distance, which, even as I was walking had gifted me a sensual and immediate awareness of the topography, and there was the map-reading, whereby I found myself regularly looking from the three-dimensional territory to its two-dimensional representation, and then back again.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
The way we currently navigate using GPS systems places us at the centre of the screen and world. In this way, it gives us absolute location (we can even get a precise grid reference), yet no real orientation. We've all had the experience of getting off a train or bus and then wandering about trying to coordinate our movements with those of our little-blue-dot alter ego, so that we can work out where the hell we are. But old-fashioned map-reading, which is the method I'd strongly enjoin for longer exurban walks, entails orienting yourself as a condition of any route-finding at all. This means that the further you go, the more you start to apprehend that that wood must border that reservoir – and furthermore, that the ground rising behind the reservoir must be a spur of that range of hill. It's this precise interpretation of the landscape (not without reason is it termed "map-reading") that leads to the astonishing exactness of recall. I retraced that walk into Essex a decade later and found that I could do it without any recourse to the map, such was the detail with which I remembered the first venture.
In Search of Lost Time
Of course, walking without a map is an even more liberating experience. I am not a rambler, or any other species of Gore-Tex-sporting hiker. Don't get me wrong – I have nothing against them, but their preoccupation with walking in particular places and at particular times is an anathema to me. My walking isn't simply a leisure pursuit; rather, it's transportation, entertainment, fitness regime and psychotherapy rolled into one. Apart from the aforementioned sensible shoes, I do take waterproofs with me. The über-annoying and self-satisfied hikers say things like: "There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing." And in respect of these temperate and rain-washed isles, they're most definitely right. However, though adequately equipped to this extent, I often set out with no clear idea of where I'm going to go. This is the dérive – or aimless drift – beloved of psychogeographers, among whose number I'm happy to include myself.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Taking our cue from the Situationists, a group of art revolutionaries who wandered the storied streets of 1950s and 1960s Paris, we see walking as a way of not only traversing space but time as well. Let me explain: once attuned to topography and well versed in the built environment, the walker becomes alert to a different sort of temporality: not the collective hallucination of incremental time displayed on the watches and computer displays that we all look at too much, but the subjective apprehension of our own duration in this world – our fundamental pace, if you like. The French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (himself no mean stomper) maintained: "We think at walking pace." And what's revealed to me when I'm walking and thinking at the same pace is the pace of everything around me – just as when we pass by two tall trees or buildings, their position relative to one another (the parallax view) makes us aware of the angle of our own traverse, so there's a temporal parallax that enables us to become aware of time not simply as an inexorable river flowing in one direction, but a huge and fluid body of fluxes and refluxes, in which we swim even as we walk.
I realise the above may seem a little verging on the mystical – especially if you began reading this with competitive track walking in mind, so hoping for some straightforward tips on whether you need spiked shoes, and how to avoid wiggling your arse too egregiously. I am, however, in deadly earnest. I sincerely believe that a walker can experience a form of time travel; moreover, that if he understands the environment he's moving through even a modicum, there's a sort of letting go that occurs as the metronomic beat of the legs begins to resemble some sort of chant – a physical "om mani padme hum", if you like. We're familiar with the free association of ideas, but in these states of walking meditation, I often feel as if I am free-associating places and spaces: seeing where I've been in terms of where I am now, and vice versa, such that it no longer matters if I'm boxed in by wet privet in Selly Oak on a wet Sunday afternoon in January.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
I would never claim that my sort of walking is adventurous in the way that man-hauling to the South Pole, or rowing the Atlantic is considered to be. But I wouldn't want that sort of adventure anyway, given that it involves ceaseless and strenuous repetition to the exclusion of all else. Talk about being bored. Instead, for me, the adventure begins every day I set out. I'm confident, even if I'm only walking to a bypass-bound retail park, that I'll encounter something fresh, new and provocative – rather than just another "new car smell" Magic Tree air-freshener, dangling from the rear-view mirror, like a man caught in a trap.
Sign up to the Men's Health newsletter and kickstart your home body plan. Make positive steps to become healthier and mentally strong with all the best fitness, muscle-building and nutrition advice delivered to your inbox.
SIGN UP
For effective home workouts, uplifting stories, easy recipes and advice you can trust, buy six issues of Men's Health UK.
SUBSCRIBE
