WRONG AGAIN

 In the interests of half-arsed research I typed ‘walking wrong’ into Google and wasn’t very surprised by what I found – this kind of thing:

 

Now of course I’m not actually going to read these articles, though I was almost sucked by this one:

 

Mistakes while walking may not be the same as walking mistakes but I didn’t trouble to find out – nice font variety through.

 

Of course many of the mistakes are apparently about posture.  Yes, sometimes the internet is just like a punishing and over critical parent – stand up straight, don’t slouch, look where you’re going. And in these cases the mistake was often revealed in the image.

But there were some surprises. Overstriding.  I’d never heard of that. 

 

Insufficient weight change – how much is sufficient?

 

And how about this one?

 

It’s the whole universe telling me that I’m walking wrong, and in the wrong direction, such as when I find myself walking into space on a concrete parabola that looks a bit like Lubetkin’s penguin pool:

And of course if you Google ‘walking right’ you still get a lot of hits telling you how you’re walking wrong. However, I this one found moderately consoling.  

Invoking scientists always raises the stakes – and scientists are rarely invoked in order to say everything’s just fine, carry on as you are. But in this case, I was encouraged by that line, ‘And there is nothing we can do about it.’ Which is fine, because nothing is exactly what I was planning to do about it anyway. 

WALKING WRONG

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

Sometimes it seems to me that people only buy weekend newspapers so they can be told that they’re doing things wrong.  They’re eating wrong, drinking wrong, sleeping wrong, dating wrong, bringing up their children wrong, and so on.   For me this  reached new heights of annoyance in Saturday’s Times, in an article by Lucy Cavendish, in which told us that most people are walking wrong too.

This is Lucy Cavendish

She was trying to improve her memory by one method or another (and walking was just one of them).  Of course I’m well used to being told that I walk too slowly.  Briskness is the new healthy walking orthodoxy, but you know, I’m inclined to walk at whatever damn speed I want. 

 

 Cavendish talked to one Susan Saunders who’s a Health Coach (yep that’s a job) who suggested that Cavendish could ‘maximise the benefits’ of her walking by combining it with mindfulness.  More than that, apparently researchers at UCL have ‘found a link between preserving cognition and undertaking self-reflection.’  The article then explained what self-reflection is for the benefit of slack-jawed readers who might be new to the idea of introspection.

 

I found the whole thing so annoying that I went for a dawdle while thinking unintrospectively about Helena Bonham Carter and Harry Styles.  I suspect they both walk wrong.

 

 

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.