The Recovery breaks offer insights on ways to support your body when, for instance, a shoulder, your lower back, or a hip hurts, and I include examples of my own experiences. Recovery techniques apply to more than injuries; all bodies need ways to recover, especially when you take on new activities and challenge your body with new movements.
Turn to Keep It Going at Home for some daily exercises and stretches you can do at home if you don’t have time for a class—or even if you do.
The Next 12 Months challenges you to take what you learned over the course of the year and apply it to the rest of your life. You may be surprised by what you learned over those 12 months—and what you want to continue doing or are ready to try out for the first time.
This book closes with a Resources section, which offers additional reading to understand movement more deeply. These include books on mobility and key books by Katy Bowman as well as nutrition resources to enhance what you learn in 24 Ways to Move More.
LET’S DO THIS!
It will take effort to change your schedule and figure out the logistics needed to start new activities. This is where the internet can come to your rescue. You can find out pretty much everything you need to know about any of the activities in this book online. Almost all fitness studios have robust websites with FAQs detailing what you’ll need for class as well as class schedules. If not, go old-school and call for information.
Some activities cost more than others, and each activity chapter lays out what you will need and my best estimate of costs for lessons or classes. Specialized sports need more equipment—winter sports, for example, require more expensive gear and clothing. With most other activities, you can likely make do with what you have.
Don’t let equipment dissuade you from doing something you’re excited to try. Many times you can rent gear—climbing gyms rent shoes, for example. I recommend renting and trying an activity before investing in equipment. Be sure you will keep doing the activity, or you may find yourself with a lot of unused new equipment to store!
Class costs vary depending on where you live. In urban centers, a single drop-in class at a fitness studio can run as high as $35. Check around for starter specials, which many studios offer, and don’t forget your local community center, which may have exactly the class you are interested in at a much lower cost.
As for choosing which level of class to start, I always recommend an intro or beginner level. When I was writing my column, I almost always started with an intro class. On the rare occasion I jumped into something more advanced, I floundered every time. No matter how strong and experienced you are, you will face a steep learning curve when taking on a new movement. Give your brain time to learn and integrate. Go to a class where the point is to break down the basics and learn that particular movement safely. Learning the basics will make for less frustration and faster growth.
Now that you’ve absorbed all this information, are you ready? Have you already homed in on the activities that excite you the most—or the ones that make you a wee bit nervous? Good. This book is not designed for you to stay comfortable in the kind of activities you already do. The intention is to move you out of what you already know and to challenge your body and mind in more ways than you thought possible. You’re in for a year of incredible growth. Let’s do this!
Month 1
Walking
The more I walked, the more I realized how often I had been choosing not to walk. Generally, I drove my car, choosing efficiency—or maybe speed? In the evening, I chilled on my couch, which calls my name at the end of a long day as a place to rest, zone out, and unwind. Plus, it’s just sitting there in my living room.
Before I discovered walking as a way to move my body every day, I was proud of how active I thought I was, from yoga to lifting weights to trying new fitness classes. I moved my body for up to two hours daily, far more than most.
Then I read Katy Bowman’s book Move Your DNA and was promptly toppled from my “I’m so active” high horse. I was exercising, but I wasn’t moving the rest of my day, and I definitely wasn’t walking much. My step count typically hovered around 3,000 to 6,000 a day, or roughly 2.5 miles, hardly a number to hoot about.
FITNESS DEVICES
I’ve tried a lot of fitness devices, from trackers to fitness apps. I wanted to know what information they would show me about how much I moved—or didn’t move. I also was curious if tracking my physical activity with a fancy gadget would motivate me to move more. My conclusions: Yes to tracking. No to expensive fitness gadgets.
I check my step count daily. My baseline for walking is 10,000 steps a day. I like knowing if I’ve reached that minimum every day. I’ve found my phone provides all the info I want, which is how many steps I walk daily. I use a free app that tells me how many times I hit 10,000 steps in a week, month, or year. My phone also keeps information on flights of stairs, but I don’t pay much attention to that data. It will track steps even on airplane mode or when I’m carrying it in a bag. The main drawback is I have to have my phone with me, but 90 percent of the time that is already true.
I’ve also tried gadgets that track not only steps but also a lot of other information while I’m engaged in an activity, and I’ve briefly been enthralled by a few over the years. Trackers can tell you exact mileage via GPS, show your heart rate, note your current ultraviolet exposure, and calculate how many calories you’ve burned, and many even come with the added convenience of buzzing when you receive texts. I’ve worn trackers overnight to assess sleeping patterns. For brief periods, I’ve worn them for the express purpose of being able to read texts on the device on my wrist instead of picking up my phone.
But, inevitably, all my trackers went by the wayside, some because I grew tired of them and stopped using them, and some due to lack of durability.
Trackers are most useful for runners, who like to know mileage and pace. But for someone like me, who just wants to know how far I’ve walked in a day, my phone has all the data I could ever want.
Bowman says 10,000 steps is the baseline needed to sustain a healthy body. A study in the International Journal of Obesity shows postal workers who walked 15,000 steps a day had no heightened risk for heart disease. Desk workers, however, added risk for heart disease for every hour beyond five that they sat in a day.
Other studies show if you walk briskly for an hour a day, it cuts the effect of obesitypromoting genes in half. It also reduces the risk of developing breast cancer, and it not only reduces arthritis-related pain but it can even prevent arthritis from forming in the first place by strengthening and lubricating joints like your knees and hips. Walking is shown to improve memory and brain function and helps maintain bone density. Walking also helps your immune system. A study of people who walked at least 20 minutes a day five days a week for 12 weeks took 43 percent fewer sick days than those who exercised once a week or less.
The statistics made me want to leap up out of my chair. From Wayne Curtis’s book The Last Great Walk, I learned that Paleolithic humans likely walked 8 to 12 miles a day, four to six times the distance the average American walks now. Curtis’s book follows the journey of the “last great pedestrian,” Edward Payson Weston, who at age 70, walked from New York to San Francisco in 1909. Did you catch that? He was 70 years old. He walked across the entire country!
In between snippets detailing Weston’s considerable challenges from weather to footwear to walk 60 miles a day, Curtis digs into the evolution of how humans began to walk, why we walk, and what it does to our bodies and minds. We evolved to walk long distances, and our genetic makeup, locked in thousands of years ago, is based on walking. But in the United States, we are walking less than ever. Not walking “is one of the