There are articles popping up everywhere lately about how walking is the “new black”. It’ll help you live longer and look younger. No, not really but it can seem that way.

I’m thinking of this recent one about a study linking less knee pain with walking: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/well/move/walking-knee-pain-relief.html

Then there’s this one from earlier in the year which addresses benefits of walking to brain health: https://www.wellandgood.com/walking-brain-health-study/

So what do you do if walking hurts?

If you look back on the series of posts starting with the first of 5 Mistakes People Make When Walking, you’ll find some ideas about what you might be doing that can be contributing to your pain. But let’s stop focusing on what we’re doing wrong and take a look at what we can do better.

Whether you’re dealing with low back pain, hip pain, knee pain, or foot pain — unless it’s a fresh injury, I encourage you to experiment with these five ideas on your next walk. It might not cure your pain but it will give you insight that you can share with your physical medicine practitioner. And it might actually help you modify your movement in a way that creates less stress around your pain.

First, keep in mind that there is no perfect “right” way to do anything. How you look when you walk is unique to your body design and doesn’t necessarily correlate with right or wrong. What matters is how it feels and these 5 suggestions will encourage you to explore the experience of walking.

One prerequisite here is that you need to be willing to feel foolish.

You probably will think that you look silly trying all of these things and in my opinion, that is an important part of this exercise. I promise that you’ll look a lot less foolish than you feel so, see if you can let go of worrying about how you look while trying these 5 smart walking explorations:

1. Be sneaky & silent

This is one of my favorite fun ways to shake up my own gait when I tire of the monotony of putting one foot in front of the other on a long walk. This works best on a trail — for the effect — but you can try it on a paved street too.

Let go of any idea of what your feet or legs are doing mechanically and instead make your main objective to be sneaky. You’ll need to use your ears for this one. Listen for how many steps you can take on your walk while making little to no sound. This includes taming the rustling of your clothing, but definitely think about softening the sound of your feet as they strike and move from heel to toe.

If you manage to quiet your steps even just a little bit, do you notice how it feels in your body? Can you feel your core engaging? You can’t properly sneak without using many different muscles than usual.

Everyone’s experience with the silent sneaky walk, will be different and you might notice yourself using foot muscles or hip muscles that you don’t normally feel. It becomes a full body activity when you start to try to walk without making sound.

2. Cross country skiing

You may never have cross country skied but you can still try this walking method. The concept just requires that you imagine yourself moving your legs primarily forward and backward in two parallel tracks. This means eliminating as much side to side and up and down movement as possible. If you think of having two really long sticks glued to your feet — your options become limited but when you have to propel yourself forward on these two sticks, you’ll also mainly be putting more effort into kicking off behind you.

See if you can make your body move forward without bouncing or swaying. This might involve leaving your feet on the ground longer, taking longer steps and pushing off behind you more intentionally

You might feel your buttocks working harder. You might notice you want to swing your arms forward and backward more as well.

3. Tightrope / monster walk combination

This is also just as it sounds. Take a few steps as though walking on a tight rope or a balance beam — one foot in front of the other. You don’t necessarily have to touch heel to toe, but keep each step on the same line as you move forward with regular strides.

Do you notice the extra challenge to your balance? Do you feel the outsides of your hips working a bit more than usual? Maybe you notice that you have to wiggle your hips more than usual to stay on the tightrope?

Great. Now do the exact opposite and take your feet wide with each step — just as wide as feels comfortable. As you go side to side, are you landing on your heels? Are you landing on your toes like you would if you were dancing? There’s no right or wrong here. Just notice what feels fun to you and check in about where you feel the effort in your body. How does it compare with the tightrope walk? Is it more or less of an effort?

4. Walk with a “load” in your pants

I apologize for this very crude and indelicate analogy, but the mental image seems to immediately trigger the intended gait modification. I used to describe this as walking with a “duck butt”, but that doesn’t quite do the trick.

When we imagine that we’ve had an embarrassing accident in our pants and are trying to walk so as to not draw attention to it, we immediately untuck the pelvis and loosen the knees in a way that can very nicely ease tension in the lower back.

Try it. Maybe you’ll come up with a better way to describe it.

If nothing else, it can offer a brief contrast in sensation to the more rigid alternative that many of us embody when walking in our official polite adult capacity.

(There might have to be a future post on the woes of tucked pelvises. We all seem to want to “suck it in” and “tuck it in” which leads to all sorts of problematic biomechanics, not to mention impaired breathing!)

5. Variety is the spice of life …and walking!

The main take-away here should be in the value of variety.

It’s important to mix it up. A 30 minute walk should include many different patterns of movement, not just the one that you have adopted out of habit over the years.

When we let go of the idea that there is a “right” way to walk, it becomes better for our body. It’s like cross training while walking. You might notice less repetitive stress on areas of pain.

You might certainly feel silly but you might also have fun and crack a smile, which in itself can be good medicine!

Let me know if you try some of these strategies, what you think and how it feels!

---

As originally published on medium.com/@yalingliou on June 17th, 2022