Solvitur Ambulando GAINZZZ

"Don't underestimate the low-key power of walking," says this article.

I walk three miles per day, most days of the week, and I'm not alone in reaping the physiological, mental, and emotional rewards of walking. In his New Yorker article, "Why Walking Helps Us Think," journalist Ferris Jabr writes that when we go for a walk, we perform better on tests of memory and attention; our brain cells build new connections, staving off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age; we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down; and our attention is left to meander and observe, helping us generate new ideas and to have strokes of insight. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a single bout of moderate-to vigorous activity (including walking) can improve our sleep, thinking, and learning, while reducing symptoms of anxiety.

And doing it outdoors can compound the dividends. According to Dr. Jo Barton, Senior Lecturer of the School of Sport, Rehabilitation and Exercise Sciences at the University of Essex, you can improve your self-esteem and your mood with just five minutes of exposure to nature. Why does it work so quickly? As Barton shares, exposure to nature helps us switch from voluntary attention, which draws on our reserves of focus and energy, to involuntary attention, which requires less focus and energy. This allows us to recover from mental fatigue.

Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Wordsworth, and Aristotle were all obsessive walkers, using the rhythm of walking to help them generate ideas. And while any form of exercise has been shown to activate the brain, walking is a proven creativity booster as well.

I realize a couple of those might not be on all readers' Favorites lists, but you get the idea.

Harvard writes of the five bonus benefits of walking.

1. It counteracts the effects of weight-promoting genes. Harvard researchers looked at 32 obesity-promoting genes in over 12,000 people to determine how much these genes actually contribute to body weight. They then discovered that, among the study participants who walked briskly for about an hour a day, the effects of those genes were cut in half.

2. It helps tame a sweet tooth. A pair of studies from the University of Exeter found that a 15-minute walk can curb cravings for chocolate and even reduce the amount of chocolate you eat in stressful situations. And the latest research confirms that walking can reduce cravings and intake of a variety of sugary snacks.

3. It reduces the risk of developing breast cancer. Researchers already know that any kind of physical activity blunts the risk of breast cancer. But an American Cancer Society study that zeroed in on walking found that women who walked seven or more hours a week had a 14% lower risk of breast cancer than those who walked three hours or fewer per week. And walking provided this protection even for the women with breast cancer risk factors, such as being overweight or using supplemental hormones.

4. It eases joint pain. Several studies have found that walking reduces arthritis-related pain, and that walking five to six miles a week can even prevent arthritis from forming in the first place. Walking protects the joints -- especially the knees and hips, which are most susceptible to osteoarthritis -- by lubricating them and strengthening the muscles that support them.

5. It boosts immune function. Walking can help protect you during cold and flu season. A study of over 1,000 men and women found that those who walked at least 20 minutes a day, at least 5 days a week, had 43% fewer sick days than those who exercised once a week or less. And if they did get sick, it was for a shorter duration, and their symptoms were milder.

The Art of Manliness, "Solivtur Ambulando: It is solved by walking."

Solvitur ambulando.

It's a Latin phrase that literally means, "It is solved by walking." Or, a little more loosely, "It is solved by walking around."

Walking? "What problems have ever been solved by walking?" you may be asking yourself.

True enough, there is hardly anything more simple and less exciting than walking. It's one of our first developmental milestones as babies, and once you take those initial toddling steps, neither you, nor those around you, take much notice of your walking ever again. If you happen to think about walking later in life, images of elderly women decked out in windsuits and circling the mall in the early morning hours may come to mind. Indeed, so unsexy is walking that our word for a person who travels by foot -- pedestrian -- is also a synonym for "dull" and "ordinary."

'Twas not always so, however. There was a time in which writers and philosophers wrote poems and paeans to the humble walk, publishing books and essays with titles such as "The Reveries of the Solitary Walker," "In Praise of Walking," and "Walking as a Fine Art." Bipedal locomotion was referred to as "the manly art of walking," and enrollment in the "noble army of walkers" was encouraged.

Did these long-dead bipedaling boosters know something that modern men do not? While walking's simplicity may seem like a mark against it, perhaps its rudimentary nature is just the thing to bring us back to life's much needed basics. Walking upright is part of what makes us human, after all, and who wouldn't benefit from getting in touch with their humanity a little more often?

...

Think of this piece as one part article, one part quote repository. Read it through in one fell swoop, or come back to it from time to time when you need some motivation to get yourself out the door.

The article provides some quotes intended to do just that:

"When I see the discomforts that ablebodied American men will put up with rather than go a mile or half a mile on foot, the abuses they will tolerate and encourage, crowding the street car on a little fall in the temperature or the appearance of an inch or two of snow, packing up to overflowing, dangling to the straps, treading on each other's toes, breathing each other's breaths, crushing the women and children, hanging by tooth and nail to a square inch of the platform, imperiling their limbs and killing the horses--I think the commonest tramp in the street has good reason to felicitate himself on his rare privilege of going afoot. Indeed, a race that neglects or despises this primitive gift, that fears the touch of the soil, that has no footpaths, no community of ownership in the land which they imply, that warns off the walker as a trespasser, that knows no way but the highway, the carriage-way, that forgets the stile, the foot-bridge, that even ignores the rights of the pedestrian in the public road, providing no escape for him but in the ditch or up the bank, is in a fair way to far more serious degeneracy." --John Burroughs, "The Exhilarations of the Road," 1895

"I have read that the Scotch once had a custom of making a yearly pilgrimage or excursion around their boroughs or cities -- 'beating the bounds,' they called it, following the boundaries that they might know what they had to defend. It is a custom that might profitably be revived. We should then know better the cities in which we live. We should be stronger, healthier, for such expeditions, and the better able and the more willing to defend our boundaries." --John Finley, "Traveling Afoot," 1917

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children- exclaimed, 'There goes a SainteTerrer,' Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean....For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels." --Henry D. Thoreau, "Walking," 1862

That etymology seems a little fanciful. EtymologyOnline says it probably comes from the French sauntrer, which itself is a contraction of/evolution from s'adventurer, or "take oneself out for an adventure." Which is also a nice etymology.

The "aller a la sainte-terre" etymology actually comes from one of the oldest English dictionaries.

This is the etymology given by Samuel Johnson in his great dictionary (1755):

To SAUNTER v.n. [aller a la sainte terre, from idle people who roved about the country, and asked charity under pretence of going a la sainte terre, to the holy land, or sans terre, as having no settled home]

But just because it's old doesn't mean it knows what it's talking about. My word as a Biden.

No one's sure where the word comes from so if you prefer the "Sainte-Terrer" explanation, there's no proof against it.

Thomas DeLauer talks about the benefits of simply walking, and how it was part of his 110-pound weight loss. Note he also dieted and lifted. And, based on his physique, probably added some Performance Enhancing Chicken and Broccoli into the mix.

So: Do you have any GAINZZZ? I have none, alas. I've backslid in the past couple of months.

I started getting up between 7:30 and 8. That's a GAINZZZ!

Anyone have any PROJEXXX ahead? Or BOOXXX they want to recommend?

It's good to have a workout buddy.

Don't pull a "Jonah Goldberg."

This isn't very funny, but here is a compilation of clips of men passing out after completing a heavy lift. Not exactly an advertisement for GAINZZZ. Consider it a caution.

This is probably fake but I just don't know what's real any longer.

posted by Ace at 04:10 PM

| Access Comments