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The power of walking
By Lee Scott
Looking for a new way to expand your business? Why not consider one of the oldest exercises? Walking! Polls conducted of the general population usually reveal that walking is the most preferred exercise. But very few of us walk with our clients and even fewer consider coaching our clients to be better, faster walkers. Offering group walking classes is an excellent way to draw new clients and revenue with very little capital expense.
You might be surprised at the wide pool from which you can draw. People who have never been active hear about a fitness walking program and think “Aha! I could do that!” At the same time, there is the incredibly large demographic of boomers/zoomers who want to stay active, and even competitive, but need to spare their knees and backs from injury. These clients are discovering great satisfaction in the number of races, including 5k, 10k, half and full marathons that are offering walking divisions.
Many people, and fitness professionals can be included, believe that walking can be done without guidance. It is true that walking is an accessible and sustainable activity for most of the population from the unfit to the fit. But to do more than just burn calories from walking – to really improve key fitness indicators – people need to get a workout from their walk.
As fitness professionals, we can help them with that workout.
It’s not easy to re-train the body in such a way that a walk becomes a workout. Imagine that you ask your right-handed client to brush their teeth with their left hand for one week. Chances are, that client will give up by the end of the first day because their teeth feel disgusting. As easy as it is to move a brush up and down over our teeth, we have well developed neuropathways from doing the motion several times with the dominant hand. It takes unrelenting concentration and constant repetition of the motion with the non-dominant hand to develop new neuropathways that allow us to actually clean our teeth using the other hand.
It’s helpful to think of training our clients to walk for fitness in the same way. Every day we walk in a certain way, at a certain speed. Our brain, always wanting to help our body take the easy way, never learns how to send messages to the large muscles at the back of the body that are required to help make a walk a workout. We must get our clients to re-think how they walk.
People signing up for classes expect you to be knowledgeable, inspiring, and organized. This requires that you understand there are two components to helping clients become fast and fit from walking. The first is teaching good walking technique. The second is guiding them through speed and intensity workouts.
Good walking technique requires that clients learn how to walk faster without increasing their risk for injury. My experience over eight years has revealed that the golden rule of coaching walkers is to help them understand that the goal is to direct energy over the ground, not into the ground. Eyes should be directed over the ground and emphasis should be placed on minimizing any bounce in the walk.
Also, every single person I have ever coached walks faster when their arms are bent as if they are about to run. Bending the arms at the elbow shortens the lever and makes it easier for the muscles involved in the arm swing to move the arms at a quicker pace. If the arms move faster, the legs move faster!
Speed and intensity workouts are also vital to improving the fitness of walkers. Any good walking program will include speed workouts in a range of variations to keep the client challenged. These speed intervals are not about running sprints with walking as recovery. The idea is to insert speed walking intervals. Work phases on these intervals can start at 10 seconds and increase in time with alternating recovery times of varying length to change the workout. Lactate threshold walking workouts can also be devised.
As walking speed increases and proficiency improves, it is often the case that walking form needs to be continually reviewed. Most people use the muscles in the lower leg for propulsive power. These are small muscles. Fast walkers must learn to recruit the larger muscles in the back of the upper legs and the back. These are skills that you, as a fitness professional, can bring to your clients.
With the great outdoors as your gym, an organized approach, and an inspirational attitude, you can start a walking program today that can be the foundation of your success as a fitness professional.
Lee Scott has been a certified fitness professional since 1991. She founded WoW Power Walking in 2002. She is the Marathon Walking Coach for Prevention magazine and she has been a featured speaker at conferences and race expos, and a guest expert in magazines and television across North America.
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