Where Walking Fits in an Athlete's Training

In this episode, Jerred discusses the importance of walking and where it fits into a healthy routine, especially for those already training regularly. He emphasizes how prolonged sitting is detrimental to both brain and body health, even for those who exercise.

Key takeaways:

• The Role of Walking: While many listeners are already training and eating well, walking can play a crucial role in managing blood sugar, especially for those with health concerns like elevated A1C levels. It can also assist with weight loss by boosting daily non-exercise activity.

• Weight Loss and Homeostasis: Jerred highlights how the body subconsciously reduces movement when training and dieting increase. To counter this, maintaining or increasing daily steps is vital. Rather than adding more exercise or cutting more calories, focusing on consistent movement outside of workouts—like maintaining an average of 10,000 steps per day—can make a difference in progress.

• The Power of Walking for Blood Sugar: Taking short walks after meals can help reduce blood sugar by 10-25%, which is beneficial for overall health. For those wanting more intensity, adding a heavy backpack (rucking) can increase the challenge.

• How Many Steps Should You Take?: Studies suggest aiming for 8,000 to 12,000 steps daily. Though the "10,000 steps" target originated from a Japanese marketing campaign, research backs it as a general guideline for health benefits.

• Building Walking into Your Routine: Incorporating walks after meals or scheduling short walking breaks throughout the day can improve mental clarity and well-being. Walking, while not the primary fitness modality for many, can significantly amplify the results of a well-rounded fitness plan.

For more resources and studies mentioned in this episode, listeners are directed to the Garage Gym Athlete website and blog.

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To becoming better!

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: 

Is walking worth it. And if so, where does it fit into your daily routine? Ladies and gentlemen, this is the garage gym athlete podcast. And I do want to talk about walking a little bit today. And I'll never forget. I came across this study years ago. And it was the big news when it was, Hey, sitting is the new smoking.

It found, they found out how bad sitting actually is for you. These prolonged. Periods of sitting and it's when you don't have the ability to move around, you're stuck or you're just not putting very much movement into your day. And that's even if you exercised, it was still detrimental. It's detrimental to your brain and is detrimental to your body to, to sit for long periods of time, not just from a mobility standpoint, but from a mortality standpoint. That's what this study was pointing out. And one thing that you can do obviously is walk more, but there are a lot of other options. But I want to get straight to the point of whether or not, where walking fits in. Because most of the people who listen to this podcast, We're training. We're doing our best to eat.

We're healthy. We're doing all those things. So do we really need to pick up walking as a habit? Is that even necessary? And if so, what does it. What does it look like? How much should we be fitting in? And I'll say this, if you are trying to. Control your blood sugar, which even as someone who's felt super healthy trains, a lot. I mentioned on the podcast, I had an A1C that was going up a little bit.

And so I needed to put more movement throughout my day. So you can be perfectly healthy and train a lot and have other reasons that aren't like weight loss. And, but that would be the second thing. Maybe you're trying to lose weight and we've looked at other studies. And. There was one study specifically that pretty much says like your mind is against you when you're trying to lose weight.

And it's not your mind. It's more like the fact that your subconscious wants to maintain homeostasis. And so putting this into perspective, if you want to lose weight, Say right now, you hit 10,000 steps a day. You don't really exercise that much. Maybe you do two or three times a week. And then, you're going to change your diet and you're like, oh, you know what?

I think I'm going to change my diet. And I'm going to increase my exercise from two days a week to five days a week. And I'm getting in 10,000 steps a day. And you notice that the needle's not really moving. So you your knee jerk reaction is okay. I'm going to keep my 10,000 steps a day.

I'm going to go up to six days a week exercise, and I'm going to reduce calories and you just trying to keep hitting it mathematically over and over again. But. If you're already pulling. The diet lever, like you have reduced a certain number of calories and you're trying to eat right. You're good there.

If you're exercising five days a week, six days a week. You're good there. It doesn't, you don't need more. You don't need longer sessions. You don't need better programming. Assuming you're already following groggy, mathlete programming. And you don't need to cut more calories where you actually need to look is this daily energy expenditure from non-exercise.

So the non-exercise activity is what we need to look at, and that is your steps per day. And so the study that I was referencing to where your subconscious is against you and wants to maintain homeostasis, what they found in this study was that if I did all those things, if I was training. Five days a week.

And I was had the right diet. And, I went from three to five days a week, on training and I had the right diet and I hit 10,000 steps per day on average. You might find that your body subconsciously. Wants to do less activity. It wants to bring you down to 8,000 steps. And you might not realize this.

If you're not paying attention to it, you're like, why, how would that happen? If you have a really hard workout, maybe you want to sit on the couch. Maybe you want to relax. Maybe more often. Maybe you want to watch a show, a TV show that you don't normally do your body in well, we'll find ways and excuses for you to rest a little bit more.

You might not fidget as much. You might not get up and walk around. It'd be all these things you don't really notice if you're just going about your day. And this happens when you add a lot of training volume to your day and maybe you've reduced calories and your body's. He's freaking out because it's going to start losing weight, but it doesn't know what's going on.

It doesn't know. Your actual cells and all the, insides of your body, they don't know, Hey, we're losing weight because we want to look better, feel better. Any of those things, it just know something crazy is happening. And so it starts your body works against you. Your mind works against you to subconsciously start to reduce those calories. And all the ways that I just mentioned.

So you might just move a little bit less. So this is one of the biggest things you can track. If you're looking to lose weight. Is your average steps per day. And it doesn't need to be crazy, but let's say you are getting 7,000 steps per day or 10,000 steps per day. At a minimum, you just need to maintain that eye.

So if you're on this weight loss journey, or you're trying to lean up a little bit and you're like, okay, my average has been 10 K, you need to keep that average at 10 K. Then you can increase the training and change the diet and make sure that the steps do not fall down. But then if you really want to push the gas pedal, then it's all three.

Okay. It's I want to have the right diet. I want to increase. My exercise is assuming you aren't already exercising, five days a week, five, six days a week. You do that now. It's okay, let's bump this up to 11,000 steps per day on average or 12 or 15,000. And if you do all of those things, you will really start to see the needle move.

And this is where I think walking. Is insanely helpful because we have covered those other studies where if you're just trying to maintain blood sugar, you can do. An explosive bout a squats. You can just do a bunch of squats every 30 minutes, every 60 minutes throughout your Workday. And that'll help you regulate blood sugar, but it's not as much movement as throwing in a 10 to 15 minute walk.

One to three times per day. That's just a lot more movement and it's a lot better. So I do think walking is king when you're trying to achieve all these different things and people often overlook it because they don't realize that the body is going to try to self-sabotage at least in the beginning, when you're adding all these new things to. To your schedule. If you are looking to add walking into your routine, a few takeaways, One walk after your meals.

That's just a great way to like habit stack because you're already going to eat. Like you have to eat two, three times a day, four times a day, whatever it is for you. And if you can go on a 10, 15, 20 minute walk, right after you eat, it's an easy way, like I said, to stack habits, but also all the research points to the fact that this can reduce your blood sugar by 10 to 25%, just by taking a quick walk.

And if you're a really fit individual and you just feel like walking doesn't really do much for you add a ruck, add a heavy backpack to it, and you will get a lot more out of that. Another thing that, people ask is like, how many steps should I be getting per day? And the range from the research is 8,000 to 12,000 steps per day. If you haven't heard. That whole 10,000 steps per day, that actually came from this like Japanese marketing campaign.

But what's funny is even though it came from a marketing campaign it's almost pretty. Spot on I looked at a couple of different studies, pretty large studies. On the benefits of walking, like how many. How many steps could you take per day to where the benefits of walking started to fall off?

And these two different studies that were relatively large, one said about 7,500, like there's no additional benefit to walking beyond 7,500 steps per day. And then another study set found it was 12,000. So that's quite a range. But to me, it's okay, so let's call it 10. Let's call it 10,000. That's right in between there.

And you're getting all the benefits. If you can have at least 10,000 steps per day, but again, you have to look at your average and what you're trying to do. So if you average a certain amount every single day, and you're looking to lose weight or lean up, this might be the one factor, the one lever, the one thing that you can do to really make a difference.

And one, one funny thing for me is I've significantly increased my steps recently and it's because I got a dog. I talked about that on a different podcast. I have a dog that I'm walking one to two times per day. Start my day off with it. Hit it around lunch as well. And it's just added a lot of movement to my day.

And that's the last and final recommendation I'll leave you with. Not get a dog, but two. Factor in all of these little breaks. So you can move a little bit more, whether that's after a meal, I think that's a great habit stack, but just factoring it into your day, actually putting it on your calendar.

Having. 10 minute walk here, 15 minute walk there. It will clear your mind. It will help you feel a lot better. And so I really think walking has a huge place in fitness. That's not just, Hey, I'm going to utilize walking as my main fitness modality. Some people do that. That's not my style, but isn't an amazing addition to what we can do as human beings and can amplify the results to what we want.

Absolutely. So I think everybody should be walking in some capacity of giving you a lot of recommendations. And studies mentioned throughout this podcast. If you want to see any of that, you can go to garage, gym, athlete.com, hit up the blog. You can see the show notes. Where we linked to a lot of the things that I'm talking about here.

And if you want to join our training, you can go to garage, gym, athlete.com and sign up for a free trial. We'd love to have you remember if you don't kill comfort will kill you.

 References:

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