<div class="block">Why walk when you can power walk? Dave McGovern, professional racewalking coach, joined <i>be Well</i> to talk about the health benefits of power walking.</div>

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Be Well: Benefits of Power Walking

Dave, I want to be able to turn my walk into a work out. So what do we need to know about power walking? Well, let's start with regular walking, walking and you're walking fast already. I can't believe you call that fast. Uh, great thing about regular walking is it's a great way to kind of get you off the couch and get you exercising. The bad thing is there's a real kind of mechanical speed limit to what most people do in their walking. So they hit about four miles an hour, then that's it. They can't faster. So there's some things that you can do to pick up that speed to make things more efficient. First thing is you want to think about taking shorter faster steps rather than long, slow steps. Ok. Your arms are going to be a big part of that. If you think about a swing ladies in the mall, they're walking. But if you think about a clock with a pendulum, this is going to be a long slow pendulum. So if you bend your elbows, just like a sprinter, you're going to have a much faster swing with your arms and that's going to lead to a much faster step. And then the third thing is most people, when they walk, they just kind of pick their feet up and plop them down. If you can actively use your feet and push yourself forward with your feet, you're going to make yourself a whole lot faster. What's the difference between power walking and just a little jog? Actually, any kind of walking, you're going to have about a third of the impact. So you're going to hit the ground with about 1.4 times your body mass with walking. It's going to be 34 or five times your body mass running. If you make a couple of more modifications into actual race walking, you can get your heart rate up as high as you can running. So it's kind of the best of both possible worlds. You're going to get your heart rate up as high burn as many calories. But with a third of the impact, what are the things we need to know about? Form body posture and things like that? If we're going to get our walk on, you definitely want to keep upright posture, you know, kind of keep your chin up. Look toward the horizon. The things that I talked about bending your elbows, the thing that is really going to make you go a lot faster is when you're running or even walking, your knee is going to be bent and running, you're going to spring yourself forward with actual race walking. That leg has to be straight and there are judges out there like in the Olympics, they're actually watching to make sure that leg is straight. If you just stand in place and pump your knees, that's really all you're doing, then you kind of add a little bit of, you know, a little bit of to it. Now, that's a full run. He just dusted me. All right. So I'm ready to keep my leg straight. Try, keep them straight, just stand in place, pump your knees and then just kind of take a little step or kind of a hop forward and then right before that heel hits, pull that back, I'm getting a workout here. That's what I'm saying. All right, those are some great tips. It's time for us to get power walking. So, thank you so much for showing us what to do. You ready? All right, let's do this. Which way this way? All right, let's get walking. You want me to put the gas on? Yeah, let's go.