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Few sports are as gentle on your body as walking, but you still need to use caution to
stay healthy. This simple program of warming up, cooling down, and stretching will help
keep you injury-free.
Warming Up
When you begin a workout, every part of you needs to be eased into it—certainly your
muscles, but also your heart and your mind. A muscle after a day at work or a night’s
sleep is like cold taffy: Bend it and it cracks, splinters, or snaps. When it’s warm,
it’s soft and pliable. A warm-up prepares your muscles for the activity to come,
letting you rehearse in slow motion the way they’ll move later. That means a warm-up
for a walking workout can simply be walking slowly for about five minutes.
Your heart is a muscle, too, and it needs to be warmed up. Those first five minutes of
easy walking coax it into working a little harder. You wouldn’t start your car’s
engine after it has sat in the cold overnight, throw the pedal to the metal, and roar down
the street. You know that you have to give the engine a few minutes to warm up, allowing
all the fluids and gears to move freely as you slowly pick up speed. The same goes for
your body’s engine, the heart.
Then there’s your mind, an important element to workout success. When you crawl out
of bed or away from your desk after eight hours, you probably don’t feel like
exercising vigorously, or even moderately. Promise yourself at least five minutes. Give
yourself permission to quit after five minutes if you don’t feel like going on. Most
likely, those first few minutes will change your mind, convincing you the workout will
feel good, and you’ll keep going.
The warm-up also lets you tune in to any part of your body that’s been twinging or
aching a bit. If that part still hurts after the warm-up, take a cue and perhaps skip this
workout. If it’s not so bad after all, continue the workout but perhaps not so
intensely. Listen to your body.
While you’re striding through the “active warm-up”—the easy movement
that comes before the stretches—take time to roll your shoulders forward and
backward, lift your shoulders to your ears and pull them down, drop your chin to your
chest, move your head from side to side, and flex your hands.
Next, especially for more-intense walks, take a few minutes for some light stretches to
loosen your muscles. For less-intense walks, stretches after the warm-up are optional.
Remember, the deep stretching happens after your workout. Muscle-loosening before activity
can include some of the same stretches you’ll do later, but don’t push the
stretch to the point of tension. There should be no pain or discomfort.
Cooling Down and Stretching Out
Avoid coming to a dead stop after a workout. Just as you had to allow your heart, mind,
and muscles to get used to the idea that you were picking up the pace, you have to give
them the same chance to realize you’re slowing down.
A cool-down is exactly what it says: cooling down your body after heating it up during a
workout. Don’t just jump into your car or a shower. Let your system cool off and
return gradually to a steady state. Repeat what you did in the warm-up. Walk slowly for
three to five minutes (or more if the workout was long and intense), rolling your
shoulders and shaking out your hands. Now you’re ready to stretch deeply.
Muscles shorten as they tire during exercise. Stretching after a workout will return them
to their pre-workout length and perhaps teach them to be a little more flexible. Working
out without stretching starts the snowball effect: You don’t stretch because
you’re tight, but the more you don’t stretch, the tighter you get!
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