WALKING WRONG

 

There was a brief news item in the Metro newspaper a couple of weeks back that read, ‘A 

lifetime of brisk walking can make your “biological age” 16 years younger by mid life.  

Health data from 405,000 Brits showed those who walked quickly had more of the DNA 

that reduces ageing, a Leicester University study found.’

 

         I didn’t know there was a kind of DNA that reduced ageing, but I’m no scientist.

       In any case, it seems I’m doomed.  I’ve never been a brisk walker.  I just haven’t. I mean sometimes I walk faster than others, if I’m in a hurry or especially eager to get somewhere, but generally I’m a bit of an ambler if not a dawdler.  It seems I’m walking all wrong.

 

It’s not the first time I’ve been told this. My dad was a great one for telling me that I was doing things wrong.  Walking was just one of them.

 

He insisted that a boy should walk with arms swinging like pendulums: right foot and left arm forward, then left foot and right arm forward,  I had difficulty with this, and I still do, but I see the point. The swinging arms surely help carry you forward.

 

Some guys at the University of Michigan would agree. They measured the energy used by people who walked in different ways—swinging their arms, holding them to their sides, and so on, and they found that the swinging actually reduces the overall amount of energy it takes to walk.  According to the study, people who hold their arms still while walking use 12 per cent more metabolic energy than people who swing their arms.

 

Of course some people walk in order to ‘keep fit,’ which may be akin to lowering their biological age, so I suppose in fact they’d welcome the chance to use extra energy.  More research required, lads.

 

I found this information while doing an online search for ‘walking wrong,’ and it appears the Internet is awash with articles telling me, and you, that we’re walking wrong, articles with titles like, ‘Common walking mistakes,’ ‘The 97 walking errors you didn’t know you were making,’ ‘101 walking blunders to avoid,’ and so on. These guys were a bit hit and miss:

         Who knew?  But my response to all this is pretty much the same as I said to my dad back in the day, ‘Leave me alone. I’ll walk to hell in my own way. And at my own pace.'

 

This is Raquel Welch in the Seinfeld episode where she doesn’t swing her arms:

 

And here she is in life – swinging with the best of them.