Reply to Hilarious Reddit thread on walking in the US vs UK

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]First of all, taking long walks (1+ hours) on [b]pavement[/b] is awful on your knees & feet, even if you don’t feel the impact immediately.

Second, if not owning a car correlated with being fitter, those who do not own cars & whom are completely reliant on public transportation (including public buses) for their every need would be the fittest among us. Obviously, that is not the case. [/quote]

Walking for an hour plus is awful on your knees and feet? The “impact” of WALKING? Is this some kind of troll post? How horrendously out of shape are you? Let me guess, if somebody does any amount of running their knees will explode by the time they are 60.

Unreal. Absent some health condition not of your own making, if you can’t walk 10 miles and you are under the age 65, you are doing life wrong. Most Americans can’t walk FIVE miles to save their life.

It’s not exclusively an American thing. I know plenty of sedentary Brits and continental Europeans. And even those that do walk a lot that just eat and drink poorly.

It’s like idiocracy sometimes. Where is the brawndo? [/quote]

You missed the “on pavement” part. Versus on soft surfaces. [/quote]

The fit neighbors I have can't walk 10 miles. Most do less than 5 on their big walks. [/quote]

If that's all they do, they're not that fit. A 3-4 mile walk for me is a rest day. Walking medium-long distances is nothing for my 44 year old body, if not a relaxing reset.
[/quote]

I tend to be one of the posters on here that snaps back at people being snarky, but I agree with this 100%.

Absent some form of health impediment, a "fit" person under the age of 65 should be able to [b]walk effectively indefinitely and certainly at least 10 miles.[/b]

Unfortunately, the percentages of people in both the US and UK that fit into that category are not very high. [/quote]

NP, I walk a brisk 5 miles daily and enjoy a long hike, but 10 miles on pavement has my feet burning, especially at a good pace. [b]Fitness (meaning muscle and cardio) has little to do with joints and feet, and it's really ignorant to pretend that walking on hard surfaces doesn't stress your support structure. 
[/b]
Re: walkability, let's be realistic about the free time people have.  If I walk my kid to school and walk home, thats an hour round trip; another hour in the afternoon. I have to start work earlier and end later to do that. Then let's say I walk to the grocery, that adds an hour or more to my trip. And by then I've only walked like 6 slow miles so I probably need to do another hour, fast, for fitness. That's 4 hours plus work and home life and social life ... it doesn't all fit. [/quote]

There have been some funny things posted on here, but this one is the best. The sentence itself is contradictory - what structures do you think are surrounding joints that actually make them function properly? Perhaps muscles and ligaments? Physical therapy works because of the adaptations sought to strengthen those structures - around the knee for example.

If your feet are "burning" after 5 miles you may need different shoes. Or, you need to walk more at those distances and it will stop. That is how fitness works. You put stress on parts of your body and it adapts. Nobody is going to discourage walking, even on concrete sidewalks. But if you want to be frail in your 80s by avoiding "stress[ing] your support structure" through something as incredibly low impact as walking, have at it. [/quote]

Oh honey, not everyone has the same feet and anatomy. So cute that this how small your world view is. It like you have a miniature brain, adorable!

I was a nurse working in hospitals for 25 years and probably clocked 20k steps a day. I absolutely cannot walk 5 miles on concrete. Instead I have to swim to keep fit.  My career taught me that you really don’t know everything about everyone and what might cause their body to react differently to different things. [/quote]

Ah… so some people have the special “non 
-pavement anatomy.”   How silly of PP not to realize.  
 :roll:  :roll: [/quote]

I'm not the nurse and yes, healthy people are put together differently in so many small but impactful ways, including for example having their left leg be slightly shorter than their right or their hips be angled in different ways or their arches especially high or low. It all affects movement. Also many have stress injuries, or issues developed in childhood, that cannot be "walked off." Nor are custom shoes a practical solution as PP implied, even in the limited situations where they would help.

It's wild how ignorant you are. [/quote]

These are all narrow exceptions. 
 [/quote]

They are not. There are dozens of variations between you and the healthy looking person walking next to you. Slightly asymmetrical legs, for example, are incredibly common. Basically all floor nurses (to use PP as an example) have work related injuries, whether from a specific incident or repeated movement. You may even have issues yourself, which you don't know about but will surface as you age.

I'm a PP who walks, I love walking, I support walkability.  But you are just wrong in your insistence that anyone who has foot pain after 10 miles of walking is unfit/fat/an exception.

If you routinely walk 10 miles without pain, I congratulate you and hope your good luck continues.  Personally I suspect at least some of the most vociferous posters don't actually do it. [/quote]

+1, I am a fitness trainer and work out for a living. I used to be a professional aerialist (aerial silks and trapeze) and I definitely understand the meaning of full body fitness.

If I walk 10 miles on pavement while sightseeing or something, even wearing my most supportive and comfortable shoes, my feet hurt at the end of the day, and often I have hip and knee pain (partially from rehabbed injuries). I'm very healthy and fit and have a healthy gait (literally was re-trained how to walk and run to reduce joint stress by my PT!) but that's just a lot of repetitive use of the same joints in the same way on an unfriendly surface.

Also, since hitting my 40s I'm more prone to water retention/bloating, and on a hot day where I'm on vacation and probably consuming somewhat more salt in my diet than normal, my feet are going to swell with all that walking, rendering even my most comfortable shoes a bit tight. I'd be putting my feet up or soaking in a tub after a day like that.

There are many practical measures of physical fitness, but walking 10 miles on pavement with "no pain" isn't one of them![/quote]

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