A Body in Motion

Virtually everyone has heard by now that a walking activity promotes physical and emotional well-being.  In medical parlance, walking is preventive physical and emotional medicine in its three major incarnations.  Walking is primary physical prevention because it enables some of us to avoid the onset of a disease, such as obesity; it is secondary prevention if it short-circuits a disease in its early stage, as can be true for hypertension; and it is tertiary prevention when it enables someone with a full blown disease, such as insulin dependent diabetes, to reduce their medication dosage. Walking is primary emotional illness prevention when an individual learns to walk to avoid becoming angry; secondary prevention if he/she takes a long walk as anger just starts to accelerate; and tertiary, in the event that it helps a person rapidly “cool off” after having experienced an angry outburst.

Although walking’s physical and emotional health benefits are widely known and promoted, some people might not like to walk and do so grudgingly at best.  Let’s consider one physical example and one emotional example demonstrating that even reluctant ones should walk the walk.

There certainly are people for whom walking is uncomfortable, causing their feet or legs to ache.  No one would fault a person diagnosed with peripheral vascular disease (PAD), a disorder that produces muscle cramps during walking, for being reluctant to walk.  However, Dr. Mary M. McDermott and her colleagues (2013) have produced research suggesting that walking might be precisely what they should do.

Their PAD patients participated in a six month program in which they walked as a group 1 day per week for 45 minutes and 5 days for 50 minutes each day at home.  Those who experienced severe pain while walking were advised to rest, and then to continue walking after the pain subsided. Patients who completed the program functioned significantly better than their control counterparts in distance walked, walking time, and general physical activity level.

What about people disinclined to walk for exercise, but not subject to ambulation-associated pain?   Would one expect them to derive any positive emotional benefit from walking?  Given my purpose in writing this post, you will not be surprised to learn that the following research-based answer, courtesy of Jeffery Miller and Zlatan Krizan (2016), is in the affirmative.

Without providing any hint as to why, Miller and Krizan had half their university student subjects sit and the other half walk as part of a situation that was presented as a test of how unfamiliar and familiar environments affect people emotionally.  All sat while watching a 10 minute video of unfamiliar Chinese landscapes.  Then the sit-group watched a video of familiar campus sites while the walk-group walked to visit the same video sites that their comrades merely sat and watched.  Results suggested, first, that non-exercise-enacted walking increased positive feelings despite the incidental nature of the walking, and second, that walking had the potential to overcome negative emotions, such as feelings of dread or boredom.

Miller and Krizan offer two major implications worth mentioning.  They suggest that walking can promote positive emotions, such as joviality and vigor.  They also support the notion that even people reluctant to be physical active derive inadvertent emotional and physical benefits from motoric engagement. 

In sum, the human body was made to move.  We feel better physically and mentally when we are in motion.  Walking—perhaps the simplest, most perfect deliberate and incidental exercise—provides primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention benefits.  Whether you want to reduce your illness risk, reduce incipient illness, or ameliorate full-blown illness, walking can confer major benefits even for persons who suffer manageable exercise-related discomfort or who are disinterested in exercise.

References:

McDermott, M. et al. (2013).  Home-Based Walking Exercise Intervention in Peripheral Artery Disease: A Randomized Clinical Trial.  JAMA, 310, 1,57-65.  Retrieved from doi:10.1001/jama.2013.7231.

Miller, Jeffrey Conrath; Krizan, Zlatan (2016).  Walking Facilitates Positive Affect (Even When Expecting the Opposite).  Emotion, April 21.  No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0040270.