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Walking: The Boring Answer That Keeps Being Right · After the Rush Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: My doctor said the word and I felt my whole face fall because I had come into
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: that appointment hoping for something with a little more dignity to it.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: A protocol,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: a machine,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: a supplement with a name I couldn't pronounce and a price that it will
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: at least make it feel serious.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: What she said instead after looking at my numbers and my chart
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: and my general midlife exasperation was walk most days.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's most of it.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: I sat there in the gown feeling faintly cheated.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Not walking.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: The particular disappointment of being handed the answer you already knew
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: by someone you were paying specifically to tell you something you didn't.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to After the Rush.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Catherine McDowell.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: If this is the first time you've found your way to these, you're in a fine place to start.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: No back episodes are required.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Come on in.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Before I go one sentence further, the honest disclaimer said plainly, I am not a physician.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I spent decades in occupational therapy,
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: so I know my way around a body and how it moves,
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: but what follows is my own experience and my own reading,
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: not a prescription for yours.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Your knees, your heart, your history are your own, and your clinician knows them and I don't.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Take what's useful.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Check the rest with the person who has your chart.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that as more than a legal reflux.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Your situation is generally yours and the worst thing a general piece
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: of advice can do is override the specific knowledge your own clinician has
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: about your own body.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: That said, let me tell you why walking annoys me and why I do it anyway.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: The annoyance is this.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: We live in a culture that has made a fortune convincing capable people that
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: the simple thing can't possibly be the real thing.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: If it were that easy, the logic goes, you'd already be doing it.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the answer must be more complicated,
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: more expensive, more hidden than a walk around the block.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole industry built on that one insecurity.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I've watched it up close for most of my working life.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: I've sat across from people who spent hundreds of dollars a month on a cabinet full
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: of supplements and could not tell you the last time they'd been outside
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: for 20 unhurried minutes.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched the fitness world sell high intensity everything to 60 year olds who
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: then hurt themselves badly enough to sit on the couch for six weeks,
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: which is the opposite of the goal.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: There is a particular kind of person And I have been her who would rather buy
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: the complicated solution than do the simple one.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because buying feels like progress and walking to
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: the corner feels like admitting you were the problem all along.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: The purchase lets you skip the part where you actually have to change on a Thursday.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: The story we get sold is that the body in this chapter needs to be conquered,
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: beaten into a new shape.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: The word floating underneath all of it, though nobody puts it on the label, is reinvention.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Become a new person,
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: a fitter person,
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: an unrecognizable person, and we have just the program to get you there.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: They show you the before and the after like they're two different people,
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole pitch depends on you agreeing that the before was somebody
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: to be ashamed of.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: I don't buy it.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't buy it when I had nothing,
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm not going to start buying it now that I can afford to.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the reframe, and it's the whole show.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: You are not a body that needs reinventing.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: You are a body that already knows how to walk.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: That has walked for 50 or 60 or 70 years.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the work of this chapter is not to become an athlete.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's to design walking back into your life that quietly stopped including it.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Design, not reinvention.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has to become anyone.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: You already own the equipment and the skill.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: The only question is where it went and how to put it back.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want to sit on that distinction for a second because it's the difference
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: between two completely different feelings about your own body.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Reinvention says the body you have is a problem to be corrected.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: A rough draft of a better body you haven't earned yet.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Design says the body you have is fine.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It simply lost a habit it used to have,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: and habits can be put back without any shame attached to the losing of them.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: One of those framings makes you feel like you're behind and failing.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: The other makes you feel like you're a capable person solving ordinary logistics problem.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: I know which one I can actually get off the couch for.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it is the one that opens by telling me I am not enough.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's the real thing that happened, if you're anything like me.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Walking didn't leave on purpose.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: It got engineered out.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: The job got a parking spot closer to the door.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: The errands became one trip in the car instead of four on foot.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: The evening that used to have a walk in it now has a couch and a screen and
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: a very good reason to stay put.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody decided to stop moving.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: The moving just got optimized away,
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: one convenience at a time,
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: until a day could go by where the longest walk I took was from the bedroom to
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: the kitchen and back.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think about the woman a generation or two ahead of the one I grew up watching,
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: who never exercised a day in their lives and would have laughed at the word.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: They also,
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: many of them,
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: never owned a car,
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: hung wash on a line,
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: walked to the market most days,
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: and kept a garden that required being up and down off the ground a hundred times
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: a summer.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody called any of it fitness.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was just the texture of an ordinary day.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the ordinary day did the work that we now try to put back in a building
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: with mirrors and a membership fee.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't get lazier than they were.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: We got a life that removed the walking and never told us it was doing it.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a character flaw.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's a design problem.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And design problems have a great virtue of being fixable without becoming
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: a different person to fix them.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now the evidence.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be careful here, the way I promised.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: In general terms,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: the research on regular,
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: moderate movement in later life is about as consistent as health research ever gets,
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: which is to say that the broad direction is steady even where
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: the details still get argued over.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: The general finding,
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: stated before any headline,
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: is that people who move regularly at a moderate level Tend to do better on
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: a whole range of measures than people who don't.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And walking counts as that moderate movement.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's an association observed across large groups.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: It is not a promise about you specifically.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: It does not mean that walking is a cure for anything.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Movement helps on average across populations.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's the honest version.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: You'll see eye-catching numbers attached to this.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: A specific step count that supposedly unlocks a specific result.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'd hold that loosely.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: The tidy figures make good headlines and
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: the actual research underneath them is messier and more hedged than
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: the headline suggests.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the round numbers you remember were often chosen because they were round,
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: not because a body knows the difference between one count and another.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: What the body seems to respond to,
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: as best as anyone can currently say, is regular and sustainable.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Not a magic threshold you either clear or fail.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: More than you're doing now, most days, in a way you'll actually keep up.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part that holds.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the piece that genuinely surprised me.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Coming from my own field,
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: the benefit that shows up most reliably in people's own reports isn't the one on
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: the cardiac chart.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's the head.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: People who walk regularly tend to say they feel steadier,
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: clearer, less pressed by whatever they were pressed by.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: I can't hand you a mechanism with any confidence,
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: and anyone who claims to fully understand why is overselling it.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it is probably the movement itself.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it is probably being outside.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it is probably just the 20 minutes of not being interrupted and untangling
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: which part does what is beyond what the research can cleanly say right now.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I can tell you what people say and what I've watched and what I feel myself on
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: the day as I actually go walk.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: The walk was never really about the heart rate.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was about 20 minutes where nobody could reach me
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: and my own thoughts finally had room to spread out.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've solved more actual problems on a slow loop around my block
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: than I ever solved sitting still and trying to solve them.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I've stopped being surprised by that.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: The body moving seems to let the mind unclench its fist just a little.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a claim I can prove to you.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pattern I've stopped arguing with.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say a thing plainly to anyone whose body doesn't cooperate the way
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: the brochures assume.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Walking is not free of cost for everyone.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Bad knees are real.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Bad hips.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Bad balance.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: A lung that doesn't feel the way it used to.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: All are real.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not going to stand here and pretend a cheerful stroll fixes what
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: a real condition makes hard.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I spent enough years working with bodies that had genuine limits To have no patience
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: for the version of this advice that treats everyone's body as identically willing.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: If that's you, the design question is the same, but the materials are different.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Shorter, slower,
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: with a pole,
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: or a friend's arm,
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: or a lap of the grocery store where the floor is flat and there's a cart to lean on
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: and a bench every so often.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched people write off movement entirely because
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: the only version they'd been shown was one their bodies couldn't do.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a real loss because it was never the only version.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: A person who can walk to the mailbox and back has a starting line.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: A person who can only stand and shift their weight in the kitchen has one too.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: The principle isn't walk a certain way.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: The principle is put some regular movement back where it quietly drained out
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: at whatever scale your actual body allows.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Check the specifics with your clinician,
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: especially if there's a heart or joint or a balance issue in the picture.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Then design for the body you have, not the one in the advertisement.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what I did.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's almost embarrassingly small.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped trying to earn the walk.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: That was the whole trick for me.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: I had this idea,
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: absorbed from somewhere I never agreed to,
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: that a walk only counted if it was long enough and brisk enough and frequent enough
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: to register as exercise.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: So on the days I couldn't do the real version, I did nothing.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And nothing became most days.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: The perfect was quietly,
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: efficiently strangling the good, the way it always does when you let it.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: The fix was to let the walk be 10 minutes, to let it be slow.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: To let it be to the corner and back in my regular shoes,
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: not in a production requiring the right clothes and 40 free minutes and a burst
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: of motivation.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was always waiting to feel and never did.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped keeping score.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: No app counting my steps back to me.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: No streak to break and then abandon out of shame the first day I missed.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Just the shoes by the door and a low bar I could clear even on a bad day,
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: which turned out to be the entire point.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because the bad days are exactly the ones where the walk does the most good
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: and gets skipped the most reliably.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Ten unglamorous minutes most days turned out to be
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: the perfect 40-minute walk I kept meaning to take and didn't.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: The boring answer keeps being right.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it keeps being right precisely because it's boring enough to actually do.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to go take one now.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as I stop talking to you.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Not a good one.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: A short one.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: In the shoes by the door.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: To the corner where the neighbor's dog will bark at me
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: the way he does every single time as though we've never met.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be back at my desk in 15 minutes and nothing about my life will look different.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly the point.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you want company for that idea, keep these coming.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if someone you know keeps meaning to start and waiting to feel ready, pass this along.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: For now, go put your shoes on.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm putting mine on too.