Benefits of walking an hour a day (and the 11 keys to doing it well and enjoying it)

Walking is one of the healthiest and cheapest exercises that can be practiced, and doing it the right way can help strengthen your heart, lungs, and muscles, as well as generate a feeling of well-being.

We are going to walk through the benefits of walking, such as physical, mental and spiritual experience.

Benefits of walking every day

When we walk in our body changes occur that have a positive impact on our health. These are the benefits of walking daily.

Activate the breathwhich stimulates the fluidity of the circulatory system and all systems and appliances, producing heat. It speeds up the transport of cellular information. It gives life, vivifies our exchange with the environment.Lifts the mood and calms the nervous systemwhen it recovers a rhythm slower than that of thought, the rhythm that touches with our feet on the ground and projects us towards the sky.It helps to lose weight. A 75-kilo person who walks briskly for ten minutes each day and for one kilometer expends 550 to 800 calories a day, that is, what a regular meal provides. It is therefore a easy way to control weight.Improves cardiovascular fitness, since walking makes the heart beat faster to transport oxygen-rich blood from the lungs to the muscles. Regular walking increases the efficiency of the heart and lungs.Lowers blood pressure and the risk of arteriosclerosisby reducing levels of low-density lipoproteins (“bad” cholesterol) and increasing high-density lipoproteins (“good” cholesterol).Prevents osteoporosis.It is one of the most important means of recovery from diseases.It generates well-being. psychologicallywalking generates a feeling of well-being and can mitigate or alleviate stress, anxiety and depressionby accelerating the production of endorphins, the body’s natural tranquilizer.Helps concentration. It makes us more receptive to any information and provides the peace of mind to select, assess and elaborate it if necessary.exercise a very necessary virtue in our days: patience.

spiritual benefits of walking

“Walker, there is no path, the path is made by walking, when walking, the path is made and, when looking back, you see the path that must never be trodden again. Traveler there is no road, but wakes in the sea.”

With this famous poem Antonio Machado presents walking as a way of living and the present as the most important moment in our life. In addition, it confirms the melancholy due to the passage of time, but also its beauty.

Walking is not just any movement, but rather the first movement that human beings learn while standing and the one that enables them to move to anywhere.

The one that defines us and makes us equal and different, because there are as many ways to walk as individuals.

It is part of the cultural heritage from the West and the East, and permeates all fields, in the form of a path traveled or to be traveled, spiritually or physically. back on the road

He Tao Te Ching says: “A ten mile road begins with one step.”

He Tibetan Book of the Dead proposes the initiation journey from death in this world to life in the hereafter.

He Santiago’s roadwhich follows the Milky Way and runs through part of Europe, is a physical path that entails a change of consciousness Like the Inca Trailwhich leads to the top of Machupichu in Peru.

“I’m tired of asking the world why and why, the wind rose has to help me and from now on you are going to see me wander, between the sky and the sea, to wander. For the mountains, the river, the sun and the sea, which taught me the verb to love.”

Tired of turning things around with your thoughts, Joan Manuel Serrat get back on the road because yesfor walking and enjoying what it offers.

walking as therapy

But something is happening that makes us lose our way and we forget the easiest way to move, precisely now that we can move with all kinds of gadgets to anywhere.

Our walks have become therapeutic activities; the displacements on foot, in connections between means of communication; our journeys are transports in which we are carried.

And a very significant fact: according to the latest research, today people walk more in cities than in rural areas, where it is easier to park cars.

One of the most pressing problems is the rush we have to get there. We do not remember that we are already in the best place, doing what we should do, at the right time.

The trip, the road, walking, lose importance with respect to the place we are going. We do not realize that our goal exists in thought, in maps, but it is only a part of the most important moment we live in and the only one we really have: the present. Although the ideal illuminates the direction of the path, it is essential to delight in the journey.

Walking to improve mood

Walking is one of the most beautiful ways to enjoy the roadto live the time that we have had to live and let the mind expand at ease in a time that belongs as much to her as to our body. It is the most human movement that exists.

It puts us in touch with the earth, tunes in with our bodyboth internally and externally, gives us a binary rhythm, vital to learn any other, since it is the rhythm that speeds up memory.

We can walk in almost all circumstances and placesand reach places that we would never reach otherwise: slopes, cliffs, shortcuts, mountains, peaks, forests…

Walking allows us to discover the essence of the places through which we pass, to observe the environment more precisely.

Even in big cities, to get to know them and reach their soulthe best thing to do is to buy a good map, put it in your pocket without looking at it and get lost in the streets, alleys and squares.

Walking is free, safe and effective. It does not require special skills or training, nor does it require machines or an instruction manual. It is recommended for all ages and in all circumstances.

Benefits of walking for the brain

According to footprints and skeletons found in West Africa, the first living beings began to walk on two legs four million years ago.

This is how another is produced revolution in autonomous movement of humans: They do not need to bend their back to the sides, like reptiles, or bend and stretch it like other mammals.

They endorse a fundamental quality: the legs and arms move in the opposite direction, through the rotational movement of the vertebral column. When the right leg steps forward, the left arm steps forward, and vice versa. It’s about a unique movement in the animal world.

The circular movement of the spine allows us to keep our balance, breathe, pick things up, look around, walk… The human being, who until then walked on all fours, must rearrange movementsfind their place and systematize them again.

To coordinate these functions, a amazing brain growth. With this neurological development the first stone is laid for the Unlimited ability to learn moves. We are capable of learning them throughout our lives.

When we still do not speak, we begin to walkin a miracle fruit of imitation that precedes any learning physical, conduct and behavior and that marks us for the rest of life.

In children it represents a revolutionary change. Suddenly they can reach unknown places and see from many more points of view than when they walk on all fours. His movements are directed to a place, they take, they taste, they fall, they learn with astonishing speed, and its dynamic development is equated to the cerebralto shortly after begin to speak.

Walking returns us to the ancestral movementthe one that has not improved or worsened throughout history, the that does not need words or reasoning but what drives these two by putting the world and its wonders, suddenly, within our reach.

It changes our position and with it the willingness to relate to ourselves and the environment. It is a physical and mental change.

walk as a ritual

Since the romantic artists in the 19th century, the quintessential walk has been through nature. Returning to her was to return to the first home, a ritual to find our roots. but nature in old Europe today it is a natural park, in which the laws of human beings and their culture continue to prevail.

On the new and wild American continent, writer Henry David Thoreau proposes caminar as a ritual in which we become naturein a mystical union that was later picked up by the movement hippy.

In Central European countries there is a tradition from medieval times that ritualizes walking.

Young people under thirty years of age left home on foot to look for places to train in a trade. They wandered the roads for three years and one day, all wearing the same outfit, black corduroy and a bundle with tools and another reserve suit.

They stopped at places where they were allowed to work and learn the trade in exchange for room and board. They stayed there for a while and they returned to the road when they mastered the technique of the place.

They constituted a guild with very clear codes of honor that were transmitted by word of mouth. As important as the trade they learned was the journey they made. Of them, today only the carpenters perpetuate this tradition, who can still be seen on the roads of Germany.

In Australia there was walkabouta rite of passage from puberty to adulthood in which aboriginal youths were abandoned in the desert. They wandered for about six months in those places to learn to survive in a hostile environment. They left with few weapons and when they returned, if they returned at all, they could enter manhood and marry. Now it’s called walkabout to walk aimlessly

meditate while walking

Let’s walk like a camel, which is the only animal that ruminates when it walks. Let’s make walking an object of study.

A traveler asked a servant of the poet wordsworth to teach him the master’s study. The butler led him to a room and said: “Here is your library, but the object of study is outside the doors.”

Walking takes us to the beginning, to the simplest, to the present moment: the one in which the intangible becomes a miraculous reality.

After walking for a while, looking ahead, towards a point, seeing everything without fixing anything, we will learn to contemplate the sky, the earth and its changes. and we will begin meditation, which consists simply of walking where we walk, with our thoughts, body and environment.

For it, we will observe the breath and its vital impulse and we will feel the organism with the five senses. AND we will notice how the thoughts flow And they change as we go.

In this flow we will realize that we are not only composed of visible solids or liquids, but a part of our being belongs to the realm of the invisibleof the ethereal: they are the thoughts, emotions, desires, memories, dreams, instincts, impulses and beliefs.

constitute another energy field, subjectivewhich is not seen and which occupies a place in our…