52 Ways to Walk: The Surprising Science of Walking for Wellness and Joy, One Week at a Time - Hardcover

Streets, Annabel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593419952 ISBN 13: 9780593419953

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

52 Ways to Walk is a short, user-friendly guide to attaining the full range of benefits that walking has to offer--physical, spiritual, and emotional--backed by the latest scientific research to inspire readers to develop a fulfilling walking lifestyle.

We think we know how to walk. After all, walking is one of the very first skills we learn. But many of us are stuck in our walking routines, forever walking in the same place, in the same way, for the same time, with the same people. With its thought-provoking and evidence-backed weekly walk routine, 52 Ways to Walk will encourage everyone to improve how they walk, while also encouraging them to seek out new locations (many on their own doorsteps), new walking companions (our brains age better when we mix up our fellow walkers), new times of the day and night, and new skills to acquire while walking.
 
Inspirational, backed by science, illuminated with human anecdote, and bolstered with how-to tips, 52 Ways to Walk will inspire, challenge, support, and encourage everyone to become more ambitious with their walking practice, revealing how walking may be the best-kept secret of the supremely healthy and happy, the creative and well-slept--those with the best posture and sharpest memories. Just about everything, it appears, can be improved and enhanced by clever and judicious walking. It turns out you actually can get more from life, one step at a time.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Annabel Abbs-Streets is the award-winning author of seven books, most recently Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women (voted a Top Ten 2021 Travel book) and 52 Ways to Walk (an Amazon best seller). Her work has been translated into 30 languages. She is a Fellow of the Brown Foundation, writes regularly for a wide variety of media and often appears on radio, TV, and podcasts. She lives in London and Sussex with her family.

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Week 1
 
Walk in the Cold

The eighteenth-century walker and writer Elizabeth Carter claimed her favorite walks were those taken in "whistling winds and driving snows." Carter wasn't as unusual as we might think. Over the years, hundreds of walkers have expressed an enduring love for ice-blasted walks in the glacial depths of winter. In Christiane Ritter's astounding account of living in the Arctic Circle, she describes her daily walk in temperatures of -31°F: "I take my walk every day . . . in circles, ten times, twenty times, over the uneven snow drifts that have frozen as hard as steel." Walking to Lhasa in 1924, the explorer Alexandra David-Néel (who famously mastered the ancient meditative practice of thumo reskiang to self-heat) was stunned into enthralled silence by "the immensity of snow . . . an everlasting immaculate whiteness." Later, having trudged through miles of knee-high snow, she pronounced it "paradise."
 
And yet for many of us, winter is the time we chose not to walk, preferring to stay home in the warm and dry. Big mistake! Decades after Carter, Ritter, and David-Néel embraced the cold, scientists are finally disentangling the extraordinary changes that take place in our bodies and brains when we spend time in moderate cold. Of course, ice, snow, and cold have been used to heal for centuries: Egyptian manuscripts refer to the use of cold water for reducing inflammation, British monks used ice as a form of anesthetic, and a nineteenth-century English physician called James Arnott used salt and crushed ice to reduce the pain of headaches and cancerous tumors.
 
Fast-forward to Japan in the year 2000, and one of the first modern experiments to hint at the complexities of cold. Researchers identified two groups of female walkers: one group wore long skirts, covering every inch of leg, and the other group wore miniskirts, exposing their legs from ankle to thigh. The women agreed to wear the same skirts for a year and to have their legs regularly scanned. At the end of winter, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans revealed that the legs of the miniskirted women had acquired an extra layer of fat. The legs of the long-skirted women, however, remained unchanged. This doesn't mean that exposure to cold makes us fat. Quite the reverse-as scientists were about to uncover.
 
At the time it was thought that only hibernating mammals and babies carried a protective wrapping of brown fat, despite emerging studies implying that a few adults (outdoor workers in Scandinavia, for example) might also have pockets of it secreted beneath their skin. It was to be another decade before American researchers discovered the remarkable truth about brown fat-sometimes called brown adipose tissue (BAT)-the cold-induced fat acquired by the Japanese miniskirt wearers.
 
In spite of its unfortunate name, brown fat is entirely free of the harmful lipids associated with excessive white or yellow fat. In fact, brown fat is a more effective fat burner than anything else, including muscle tissue, which might explain why thin, active people often carry more brown fat than their larger, more sedentary counterparts.
 
But the most dramatic discovery came when researchers analyzed brown fat and found it packed with mitochondria, the tiny factories inside our cells that convert the food we eat and the oxygen we breathe into a form of energy called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP supports every cellular process in our body. Brown fat exists to keep us warm and breathing (alive), which explains why a flash of cold spurs it into life-increasing our metabolism, regulating our appetite, improving our insulin sensitivity, halting the premature death of our cells.
 
Brown fat achieves this by producing molecules called batokines, which help preserve us in multiple ways. For example, batokines appear to stimulate production of follistatin, a protein that strengthens our muscles. Batokines also increase a compound called IGF-1, which encourages growth in every cell we have, meaning (very simply) that our bodies are better able to repair themselves, and hinting at why a 2021 study found people with good stocks of brown fat were also less likely to suffer from hypertension, congestive heart failure, and coronary artery disease. No wonder scientists are hopping with excitement at the therapeutic possibilities of brown fat.
 
Not only does brisk walking in cold weather keep our cells healthy and our bodies in trim, muscular shape, it also keeps our brains in good working order. Studies suggest that we think more clearly in cold weather than in hot weather. Our brains run on glucose, and when glucose is low, our brains become sluggish. We use more glucose cooling down than we use warming up, which could explain why some of us feel brain-foggy in hot climates but zingily alert in cold climates. A 2017 study from Stanford University found that people thought more decisively, calmly, and rationally in lower temperatures than in higher temperatures, reflecting a 2012 study that found warm weather not only impaired people's ability to make complex decisions but made them more reluctant to engage with the decision in the first place.
 
We don't need to feel cold to experience enhanced cognition: merely looking at "cold" pictures makes our brains work with greater rigor. When Israeli researchers gave people a series of cognition tests interspersed with background images of either wintry, summery, or neutral landscapes, the participants achieved their best scores when they had the wintry images in their peripheral vision.
 
Cold, in moderation, is also good for our mental health. A study of Polish students found that fifteen minutes in a chilly, leafless forest had "substantial emotional, restorative and revitalizing effects," implying that nature can make us feel just as rejuvenated in bare winter as in green-gold spring.
 
Finally, a spot of cold appears to reduce feelings of stress. A 2018 report from the University of Luxembourg found that repeatedly applying cold to the necks of volunteers activated their parasympathetic (calming) nervous system, slowing and steadying heart rates-and raising the possibility that a judicious dose of chill could be more calming than one might think.
 
None of this is to suggest we purposefully make ourselves cold and miserable. Instead, we should welcome the colder months as an exhilarating time to walk. The views are altered: who doesn't love the new vistas through sculpturally skeletal trees? Or the monochrome geometry of lines and shapes? Birdlife is more readily visible. Our brains are sharper, more zestily alert. Our beneficial brown fat is urged into action. To top it all, we build endurance: in lower temperatures, our hearts don't have to work so hard and we sweat less, meaning our bodies work more efficiently.
 
Tips
 
How cold does it have to be? Not particularly . . . Brown fat is activated in mild cold, around 61°F, according to Dutch physiologist and brown fat researcher Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt.
 
How long should we walk for? As long as suits, but one study found that two hours of exposure to moderate cold triggered the conversion of (bad) white fat (particularly in our stomachs and thighs) into (good) brown fat.
 
Hate the cold? Numerous studies show that cold becomes less intimidating and discomforting the more we expose ourselves to it-a process called habituation. Wrap up warmly and increase the length of your walks bit by bit.
 
Worried that cold air exacerbates allergies and asthma? A growing body of evidence suggests that winter exercise may do quite the reverse, reducing allergic inflammation in the airways and improving respiratory symptoms in many adult...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593419952
• ISBN 13: 9780593419953
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 267
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: G.P. Putnam's Sons; https://www.penguin.com/putnam/; ; 1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland