How Walking Good For Health

  Many Steps You Really Need Per Day For Optimal Health

Often we hear that number 10 it's 10,000 steps a day as if there was some magical number and the reason we keep hearing that is that research has shown that people who walk more they are healthier they live longer they have less disease, they lose weight better they have lower incidence of  type 2 diabetes cardiovascular disease dementia and so on but this research also shows that 2000 steps is a lot better than nothing and it shows that ten thousand steps is better than five thousand so more steps of walking more is better than walking less for your health.

And some Research indicates that people have more of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that we can assume our ancestors had they probably take upwards of thirty thousand own steps a day so that would be how much our bodies are genetically designed for or how much we would actually need but the problem with all this research and all the people quoting the research and trying to come up with guidelines is they don't explain anything about why steps or walking would do this is there something magical about steps so basically these recommendations now just become something else that we should do but you do not need another should we need to understand how this stuff works so first you need to light yourself enough you need to care enough about yourself to want to take care of yourself the best way you can then you want to understand why steps would help or what other types of activity would help and what it does and then you can start doing it right so first of all it's not really about steps but it is an indicator of your overall activity because for a lot of people.

It's the only exercise they get is walking and therefore if you walk more than you have a higher overall activity but really what this walking or activity does is it provides three things one is brain stimulation it provides circulatory benefits and hormonal benefits now why would brain stimulation be so important because every cell in your body every tissue works on the principle of use it or lose it resources are precious in the body so if we don't use something then why keep it around so basically muscles need tension the purpose of a muscle is to create tension if we do that we get muscles. if we stop doing that if we have less tension now we get atrophy use it or lose it same thing with bones the purpose of Bones is to resist gravity if we have less gravity or if we have less activity that exposes us to the impact of gravity now we get osteoporosis now the purpose of the brain is to receive and process and produce signals so if we have enough signals we're going to have a strong brain but if we start having less signals for the brain to process now we get brain degeneration which is just another word for atrophy meaning the tissue shrinks and goes away and if you want to create more signals for the brain then you need to start understanding where they come from and the vast majority of signals come from Movement we have three tissues primarily joints muscles and tendons that pick up different aspects of motion and tension and transmitted to the brain as signals and motion obviously is all about joints.

We have over 300 joints in the body and over a hundred of those are in the spine but it doesn't even end there it's about receptor density it's how many receptors. we have per square inch and we need a whole lot more of them where it's important so recepe chapters increase in density as we get closer to the mid-line of the body and the increase as we go from the bottom to the top so basically the spine and closer to the head is where we get the biggest bang for the buck and even though most of the signals are generated for movement out of those signals more than 90 percent are generated from the spine and especially the upper portion of the spine.

And if you start understanding some of that then it's not just how many steps you take but it is how you walk and there's a huge difference if you walk actively and you create some motion in the whole body or if you're just staring at your phone and stepping along like this it's not the number of steps it is how many signals are generated as you do it so here's what's happening when you walk if you have a person who's facing this way then the they have different curves in the spine and the first first curve in the neck is called lordosis or lordonic curve and then as you get into the chest it turns the other way and it's called a psychosis then you get into the lumbar and now it turns the other way again and then it finishes in the sacrum.

Basically have one two three curves and these act as shock absorbers. it's like a spring that as you're walking. and bouncing a little bit then the brain and the head and the tissues are protected by this spring action and this is one more curve than most other land animals are going to have if they walk on all fours if they're not fully upright then they only need two curves but with these three curves we have more shock absorption when we're walking fully upright so,  therefore your posture. when you're walking is hugely important because if you have a proper posture and your upright now these curves are going to flow one into the other.

 

they're going to cooperate you're going to get more motion from each little bounce of the spring you're going to get more signals generated into the brain. whereas if you don't have a good posture if you're walking hunched over and you're looking at your iPad or your phone now you're not getting nearly the same number of signals generated another thing that matters  with the posture is the intensity so you basically have one if we look at the body from the top now there is one axis  through the hips and one axis through the shoulders.

So if you're walking in a full range of motion and Swinging your arms  now you're going to have a rotation a counter rotation between the shoulders and the hips and now we're getting more of  that motion into the body the next benefit is circulatory when you walk you increase your heart rate you increase your circulation and when you pump more blood you increase the oxygenation you deliver more oxygen and more nutrients to every cell in the body and while the blood is doing that is also picking up more waste so it's a form of detox it's assisting your body in its detoxification process.

But just how much blood are you pumping. is the circulation your heart fills up with blood and then when it's full it squeezes. it back out that's called stroke volume the amount and that's roughly 70 milliliters and on average people have about a heart rate of 70 beats per minute. so we multiply that out and we get five liters of blood circulating every minute and that's also roughly.

 

How much blood a normal person has five liters so you circulate all your blood on average every minute at rest. but when you exercise now you increase the circulation so the blood is also coming back faster to the heart and it's filling up the heart faster and more so if we fill it more the heart is going to squeeze harder more effectively. and we could actually double that stroke volume and if we increase the stroke volume and the heart rate we could pump as much as 17 liters of blood in something as simple as walking. it's not even like maximum effort here and even if these numbers don't apply exactly to you. it gives you the idea that you can dramatically increase that circulation by something as simple as walking but there are more benefits than just the heart  pumping there are other pumping mechanisms from exercise walk there is a squeezing of the calf.

 And you have veins in the calf that the muscles squeeze on it and it helps return the blood to the heart. and this is very important mechanism this is also why walking helps reduce varicose veins because we help reduce that venous pressure in the lower extremity. and one more pumping mechanism is in all of the joints so in every joint you have something called synovial fluid and it's very important for the body to keep the blood circulation separate from the inside of the joint where the synovial fluid is because those red blood cells could destroy the joint and therefore the the blood only gets to the outside of the joint and the inside of the joint is very poorly oxygenated so the the nutrients and the oxygen are diffused by a pumping mechanism. as we move the joint we're kind  of squishing that fluid around and that is how we get new fluid in and old fluid and nutrients and waste out so cartilage.

 

For example has no vascularity there are no blood vessels in cartilage but we still need to get some nutrients there cartilage heals very very slowly if at all but we still need to get some nutrients there and this pumping action from motion is what drives that so here you  basically want to think of Sponge Bob that if you squeeze the fluid out and then you let go now it's going to suck fluid back in so that's another very important mechanism from exercise and walking but exercise also has hormonal benefits.

And one of those is that you increase growth hormone with all activity there's a little bit of growth hormone increase and there's also an increase in something called bdnf brain derived neurotrophic factor and these two put together are essential for making new synapses for making new Pathways in the brain for improving neuron plasticity and helping the brain learn and in all the other things the brain does so there's an enormous benefit to exercise for brain health and another  benefit is that it will reduce the dependence on insulin walking you will use up some carbohydrates that will reduce the need for insulin but more so the cells the muscles when they're active they don't need hardly any insulin to get the glucose  into the muscle so an active muscle is much more insulin sensitive.

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