Movement: Why Walking Isn't Enough (But It's Still Worth Doing)

Let me say something that might sound contradictory coming from someone who spent years commuting by bicycle and hiking across mountain ranges.

For most of my adult life I was active but not well-moved. There's a difference, and understanding it has changed how I think about exercise entirely.

Walking: What It Does and Doesn't Do

Walking is genuinely good for you. I want to be clear about that before I complicate it, because the complications are real.

A walk after a meal does something remarkable for your blood sugar. Rather than spiking and crashing as your digestive system works through the food, a gentle fifteen to twenty minute walk helps your muscles absorb glucose from the bloodstream and blunts that insulin response significantly. For anyone concerned about metabolic health, this single habit is one of the most accessible and effective tools available.

Walking also gives your mind room to breathe. It's one of the few activities where thinking happens naturally, without effort or agenda. Problems that feel stuck at a desk often loosen up on a walk. Ideas arrive. The nervous system settles. There's a reason so many writers, philosophers, and thinkers throughout history were obsessive walkers.

What walking doesn't do particularly well is change your body composition, build meaningful strength, or improve cardiovascular fitness. For those outcomes you need to work at a different intensity, and the science on this is fairly clear.

The Zones That Actually Make a Difference

When it comes to changing your body and improving your fitness, two zones of effort produce the most meaningful results.

The first is what's sometimes called Zone 2, a moderate intensity where you're working hard enough that conversation is possible but laboured. You can still talk, but you have to think about it. A brisk walk won't get most people there. You really need to be moving with intention, whether that's a fast walk with incline, cycling, swimming, or any other activity that genuinely elevates your heart rate and keeps it there.

The second is high intensity effort, Zone 5, where you're pushing close to your limit. Short bursts of this kind of effort, think sprints, hard intervals, or demanding physical work, produce hormonal and metabolic responses that moderate exercise simply doesn't trigger. Growth hormone, fat metabolism, cardiovascular adaptation. The body responds to genuine challenge in ways it doesn't respond to comfortable effort.

Most people, if they exercise at all, work in the middle. Not easy enough to be genuinely restorative, not hard enough to produce real adaptation. It's the zone that feels virtuous but delivers the least return.

I'm not doing Zone 5 work yet. I've only recently established a consistent morning movement practice and I'm focused on building the foundation first. But understanding where the results actually come from means I know where I'm headed when my body is ready for more.

The Three Planes Nobody Talks About

Here's something I didn't know until I started looking into why I was flexible in some ways and stiff in others despite years of being physically active.

Your body moves in three planes. Front to back, side to side, and rotationally. Most popular forms of exercise only train one of them.

Swimming is almost entirely front to back. So is running. So is cycling. So are most gym machines, which are specifically designed to isolate movement in a single plane for safety and measurement purposes. If your exercise life has consisted mainly of these activities, you've probably developed strength and flexibility in one direction while the other two quietly deteriorated.

This explains a lot. The cyclist who can't rotate their torso. The runner whose hips are locked. The swimmer with stiff lateral movement. Their fitness is real, but it's incomplete in ways they may not notice until something goes wrong.

Movement that takes your body through all three planes, that asks you to rotate, lean sideways, reach diagonally, change direction, is the kind of movement that actually prepares you for real life. Real life doesn't happen in a single plane.

The Surprising Truth About Flexibility

This one genuinely surprised me when I learned it.

When you're anaesthetised, fully unconscious and completely relaxed, a trained practitioner can move your leg up beside your ear. Any leg. Almost any person. The range of motion is there in almost all of us. We are not inflexible because our muscles are too short. We are inflexible because our nervous system won't allow us to go there.

The explanation, as I understand it, is that your nervous system is constantly monitoring your movements and making judgements about safety. When you approach the edge of your comfortable range, it applies the brakes. It's not protecting you from a muscle tear, it's protecting you from moving into territory where it doesn't trust your stability and strength to keep you safe. So it restricts you. What feels like tightness is often your own body's protective response rather than a structural limitation.

This changes how you should think about stretching. Forcing yourself past the point of resistance, which is how most people stretch, is essentially fighting your nervous system rather than working with it. You might gain a little range temporarily, but you're not teaching your body to trust the new position.

The better approach is to move into and through those ranges rather than hold and push against them. Movements that require flexibility as part of their execution, rather than static stretches held against resistance, gradually teach your nervous system that you can be stable and strong in those positions. Over time it releases the restriction because you've demonstrated that you can be trusted there.

This is why my morning movement practice has improved my flexibility more than years of occasional stretching ever did. I'm not stretching. I'm moving in ways that require my body to be flexible, and my body is slowly learning to allow it.

What My Daughter Showed Me

I thought I was reasonably flexible. I was wrong.

My daughter came to me one day and asked if I could do a few simple movements. Could I reach my hand up behind my back to between my shoulder blades? Barely past my lower back. Could I bend my fingers backwards to ninety degrees? They refused to get close. Could I sit in a full squat with my heels on the ground? I fell backwards.

None of these are athletic feats. They're basic functional movements that a healthy body should be able to perform. And I couldn't do any of them properly.

The uncomfortable truth is that we don't notice this kind of decline because it happens gradually and we don't have a reference point. We see our ageing in photos. We don't see our flexibility disappearing because we simply stop attempting the things we've lost. The limitation becomes invisible because we unconsciously work around it.

All three of those movements are things I'm now working on specifically, and all three are improving. Not because I'm doing anything heroic, but because I'm moving deliberately every day and asking my body to do things it had quietly stopped doing.

Strength: Why It Matters More Than You Think

Muscle mass is not just about looking strong or being able to lift heavy things. As we age it becomes one of the clearest indicators of health and of our ability to recover from illness, injury, and the general challenges that life brings.

Inside your muscles is a significant portion of your immune function. Muscle tissue stores glucose in a way that protects metabolic health. Muscle mass correlates with longevity in ways that researchers are still working to fully understand, but the signal is consistent across study after study. More muscle mass in your fifties and sixties is associated with better health outcomes across almost every measure.

The problem is that muscle mass declines from around your thirties onwards if you're not actively working against that decline. Slowly, quietly, without announcing itself. You don't feel your muscles shrinking. You just gradually find that things that were easy are a little harder, that you tire a little sooner, that recovery takes a little longer.

Building and maintaining muscle doesn't require a gym membership or hours of training. Calisthenics, bodyweight exercises done at home, are remarkably effective for building functional strength in the areas that matter most. Pushups, squats, lunges, pulling movements. Done consistently, these build the kind of whole-body strength that makes daily life feel easy rather than effortful.

The Fall Question

Here is a sobering thought about ageing that most people don't consider until it's relevant to them personally.

Every day you encounter dozens of micro-challenges to your balance and stability. You stub your toe. You step on an uneven surface. You reach for something and your centre of gravity shifts unexpectedly. In a young body with fast reflexes, these events are handled automatically and instantly. You barely notice them.

As we age, the fast-twitch muscle fibres responsible for those rapid responses diminish. The reactions slow. The window between a stumble and a fall narrows. Eventually, falls become a genuine risk, and falls in older age are one of the leading causes of serious injury, loss of independence, and decline.

The good news is that this is trainable. Specific movements that challenge your balance and demand quick stabilising responses can maintain and even rebuild fast-twitch capacity. Balance training, reactive movements, exercises that put you in unstable positions and require you to recover, all of these keep the system sharp.

This is not about vanity or athletic performance. It's about being the person who catches themselves when they stumble rather than the person who falls. It's about being around for your grandchildren not just in years but in capability.

You Don't Have to Wait Until You're Ready

I want to end with something practical, because I know how easy it is to read about exercise and feel overwhelmed before you've done anything.

You don't need a program or a gym or a plan. You need to move more than you're moving now, starting today, in whatever form that takes.

Park further away from the shops and walk the extra distance. Take the stairs instead of the escalator. Leave the car behind for short trips. Get on a bike. Walk after dinner. These small choices, made consistently, begin to shift things. They build the habit of movement before the habit of exercise, and the habit of movement is where everything else starts.

My own morning routine began with a single reminder on my phone: move. That was the whole instruction. Some mornings I do three minutes. Some mornings I do thirty. But I do it every day, and the cumulative effect over months has been more significant than I expected.

Your body was designed to move. It wants to move. The question is just whether you're going to give it the opportunity.

Next post: identity and how the story you tell yourself about who you are shapes every health decision you make, often without you realising it.