We’ve talked about walking barefoot at Walking.org before, but now that we can enjoy a spectacular spring in Great Britain, and an equally scorching summer forecast to follow, it’s time to take of your shoes and socks, wiggle to toes and give barefoot walking a go!

We won’t lie to you, walking barefoot feels weird and it goes to show just how much we wear shoes. Small stones will most likely hurt, pavements will be incredibly hot due to the sun, the grass will tickles and generally your soles are going to be very sensitive to start with.

But the more you walk in your barefeet, the more comfortable you will become. Even if you’re a seasoned hiker, the soles of your feet are going to take some time to toughen up.

Barefoot walking has a number of health benefits over normal walking because you use the muscles in your feet and calves all the more. This is because instead of heel striking, like you would in a pair of cushioned shoes, you have to walk using your mid foot. If you continue heel striking, it’s going to hurt!

We’d recommend only barefoot walking on soft surfaces at first, like grass and sand. In fact, there’s nothing quite so lovely as a casual stroll through the fields or along the beach.

If you’re worried about sharp stones, hot sand or anything unpleasant you may tread on, we wholeheartedly recommend Vibram Five Fingers. They are quite expensive, but there’s a fantastic FiveFingers review if you’re interested.

So get out there and enjoy the sunshine this weekend and let your feet breathe while you’re at it. You’ll miss the warm weather when it’s gone!

Aristotle, who was known for the Peripatetic school of philosophy, would discourse with his
students whilst walking around the grounds of the Academy. Emmanuel Kant walked every afternoon, and Rousseau said of his walks, ‘Never have I thought so much, never have I realized my existence so much, I have been so much alive.’ Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and de Quincey were all inveterate walkers. It was estimated by Wordsworth’s friends that during the course of his life he walked 185,000 miles In the English Lake District, which inspired him to ’see into the heart of things’ and to write about:

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling place is the light of setting
suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

The modern Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas, has written of a similar feeling about walking in his poem, ‘The Moor’:

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

Dickens, Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Ruskin and Jane Austen all used their walks to free the creative mind. Beethoven and Mozart both took to the woods to discover their own ‘creator spiritus’. Would Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony exist but for his walks in the Vienna woods ? Would Mozart have given us The Marriage of Figaro if he had not sought inspiration in the open air? Not only men of genius, but ordinary people, have been discovering for centuries that walking has a special quality about it.

Inner walking frees us from the tyranny of the conscious mind and lets the intuitive mind breathe.

Life is surely about more than simply having a healthy mind in a healthy body. Once you have discovered the benefits of aerobic walking for health, fitness and slimness, you will want to go further and discover the psychological and spiritual benefits provided by inner walking.

‘Know thyself,’ the Greek philosopher Socrates said. ‘If I am not myself, who else will be?’ the walking philosopher and writer Thoreau said.

The longest journey we ever make is the journey within. We may use one of the more traditional methods to come to a greater realisation of ourselves and discover a deeper meaning of life, or we may improvise our own methods using one or all of the above disciplines. The important thing is the realisation that we need to make the journey if we are to be whole.

Some people use prayer, others use meditation and yoga techniques to prepare for the journey inward. The one thing that they all have in common is the need for total relaxation: a letting go of obsessive thoughts and all the clutter and confusion going on in the mind.

So where do we start?

‘The way out is via the door.’ (Lao-Tse)

Walking Meditation

Inner walking is walking meditation, and it begins with relaxation and the feeling of letting go. Inner walking has nothing to do with goals or objectives. Use aerobic walking to get fit, improve your cardiovascular system and lose weight; use inner walking to encounter a deeper self-knowledge, greater concentration and serenity.

You can use walking meditation to break the pattern of obsessive thoughts and tension. You can use it to centre yourself inside your own experience and give yourself an overview of what is happening inside – what is really happening, not what you thought was happening. Walking meditation will put you at the centre of your life and give you control over your life.

So today, right now, walk out into the open air and touch the Earth with this simple walking meditation. This is not a brisk fitness walk; this is a slow meditative walk, where you follow your breathing as you take each step. As you breathe in, count the number of steps you take. Taking three steps, say to yourself: ‘In, in, in.’ Then as you breathe out, say: ‘Out, out, out.’ You might want to try breathing out to the count of four: ‘Out, out, out, out.’ The important thing is to get the rhythm right – the rhythm that feels right for your own body, your own speed and stride length. Experiment until you get a calm rhythm flowing through your walk.

Here’s another simple meditation – a mindfulness meditation. As you walk, bring your awareness into your feet and breathe as if you were breathing from the soles of your feet. Feel the connection with the Earth beneath you and let your awareness flow into each movement you make. Walk tall and imagine a white thread pulling your whole body upwards, stretching it. Then imagine a white light coming up through the ground and filling your whole body with this calm, healing light.

Today, tread softly on the Earth, for the Earth is your friend and the Earth will heal you.

‘All walking is discovery. On foot we take time to see things whole.’
Hal Borland

Most people seem to be busy during the evenings or at the weekend, which leaves little time for group outdoor activities. Whatever the reason, it’s times like this that your four-legged friend provides the perfect way to get out in the fresh air.

While more apathetic persons have turned to professional dog walkers to give their pooches the exercise they need, the most obvious benefit of dog walking is achieving an adequate amount of exercise for yourself.

There are numerous benefits gained from walking the dog once a day. Not only does it help to reduce the chance of heart attack, stroke, obesity and stress, but dogs are always eager to go for a walk, so should you ever get the notion to shirk from taking the dog for a walk, your dog will let you know about it! This way, the chance of skipping your dog walking session is greatly reduced. Once you get into a pattern, your dog will keep you in a fixed routine of walking, even if it’s chucking it down with rain, so be sure to put on your waterproof boots to stay safe in all weather conditions.

Walking with your dog is much more fun than walking alone and dogs are great stress relievers too, which can help you to forget your worries and take in the wonder of your surroundings, whether you’re walking to the local shops and back or through the park.

Dog walking is the easiest and cheapest method to keep you and your dog fit and healthy. So get out there and start walking. And if you don’t have a dog, ask if you can take a neighbour’s dog for a walk instead!

95 per cent of people will suffer from back pain at some time in their lives. ‘Oh, if only I could do something for my aching back,’ must be one of the most common medical complaints. Fitness walking can provide relief for many people suffering from back pain.

‘Taking a walk regularly is one of the best things you can do for your back. It promotes muscular development, increases circulation, and speeds the release of endorphins which provide a natural ‘high’, says Dr John Regan, a surgeon at Texas Back Institute. He goes on to say that: ‘Walking also lacks the jarring impact associated with many other forms of exercise.’

Yoga teaches us that old age comes with the stiffening of the backbone; and it is this stiffening that causes loss of flexibility in the back and joints, and also affects the roots of the spinal nerves, affecting other functions of the body – circulation, digestion and respiration. For the spine to be healthy it needs to be supple, and for this it must have exercise otherwise it receives less blood – which means less nourishment. Wastes are not carried away; muscles and nerves are affected; tiredness and ill-health ensue. Fitness walking can provide the exercise needed to help keep the back and joints flexible.

Our sedentary lifestyles and bad posture can lead to lower back pain, and sitting for long periods of time can cause a shortening of certain postural muscles. Many lower back injuries are caused by jogging (where the feet strike the ground with 3-4 times body weight) and dance aerobics (where the feet strike the ground with 4-5 times body weight). Fitness walking provides an ideal programme of exercise which can be built up gradually to give mobility to the back. It will also help those who have suffered an injury to their back (remember that fitness walkers’ feet only strike the ground with 1-1.5 times their body weight). And it will help those who have been inactive for a long time and wish to start a moderate fitness programme.

Fitness walking strengthens the muscles in the pelvis and lower back. If you have a back problem, you may actually feel better walking than sitting, as the forward movement of the body reduces the force of gravity on your back. Sitting and standing can both put more strain on the spine than walking. If you sit for long, your body weight is unevenly distributed onto the lower back and hips. People who spend a lot of time driving a car may suffer similar problems. Just as it is important to get up from a chair at regular intervals and go for a walk, so it is for drivers to stop regularly to stretch their legs and go for a walk.

It is important to emphasise that to develop mobility in the back a programme of fitness walking and stretching exercises is necesssary. It is total fitness which strenghten the back muscles and helps to alleviate aches and pains.

If you have a serious back problem, consult your doctor before starting out on a fitness walking and exercise programme.

The reason is simple. The human body is not built for sitting, whether it is in a chair, a car seat, or at an office desk – it is designed to move. There is a yogi saying: ‘movement is life.’ Unless we wake up to the effects that our sedentary lives are having upon us and do something positive about them, then stress will be the logical outcome of our inaction. At the very least we are likely tosuffer fatigue, irritability and psychological and emotional discomfort. Then come the stiff necks, stiff backs, headaches and numerous physical problems associated with inactivity, which often remain undiagnosed.

When we sit, our head and shoulders tend to pull the body forward under the force of gravity, and this places undue strain on the muscles and spine. Instead of sitting with good posture, many of us sit hunched over our work, and it is the cumulative strain on our bodies that eventually causes the tension and stress that many of us suffer from. In contrast, when we walk we come into our natural inheritance: our bodies are designed to move; they are designed to function in the regular rhythmical way that walking gives them. In Scholar Gypsies, John Buchan has this to say about our sedentary condition and how walking can help: ‘As a man’s mind is richly advantaged, so also is his body. He loses the sickly humours, the lassitude, the dullness, which oppress all sedentary folk.’

Walking is the answer to stress. Walking frees the mind from the stresses and strains of the day. It releases tensions that build up, sometimes out of all proportion. Going for a walk is as good and probably even better than having a rest. Dr Hans Selye said that: ‘voluntary change of activity is as good as a rest’. So when you are feeling tense or anxious, get out of your home or office and walk the tensions away.

Walking recharges our batteries after tension and stress have drained them of power and energy. Walking is as natural as breathing, and it is the regular rhythmical action of walking that drains away tension from our muscles and leaves us with a feeling of pleasant tiredness and a calm, clear mind. Walking works, because as we hit our natural stride, we become unconscious of our body and its movement – we are aware only of the rhythm. We are borne along in a total body-mind experience which makes us whole. Birds fly; fish swim; man walks.

Until you have felt the rhythm of a good walk in your own muscles, and the psycho-physical tonic of a brisk walkout in your own mind and body, you don’t know what you’ve been missing. Because of the structure, shape and flexibility of the spine, the human body is better suited for walking than any other aerobic activity. Your body is built for action and movement, and as a way of getting from one place to another, it reaches its highest state of physical perfection in the act of walking. The following are just some of the benefits which walking can give you.

Walking Strengthens the Heart and Lungs

Provided you don’t stroll, but pace briskly, walking expands your lung capacity, and the efficiency of your exercising muscles and blood circulation is increased so that muscles and blood can process more oxygen – the aerobic effect. The beneficial effects are borne out by several studies which found that the least active people are twice as likely to have heart disease as the most active. More than 40 scientific studies worldwide have shown that moderate physical activity like fitness walking develops cardiovascular health and protects against heart disease. The Paffenburger study in the USA found that walking two miles a day can lower your chance of a heart attack by up to 30 per cent.

Walking Reduces Blood Pressure

Scientists have known for years that both exercise and weight loss, independent of each other, can lower blood pressure. Fitness walking, because it gives the heart an aerobic workout, helps to make the heart more efficient and at the same time helps the body burn calories which reduces body weight.

Walking Raises Level of ‘Good’ Cholesterol

Walking won’t cut high cholesterol – the only way you can do that is to eat less fat which you can do by following The Walker’s Diet. But fitness walking can alter the ratio of ‘good cholesterol’ (the so-called HDLs which protect the arteries) to ‘bad’cholesterol’ (the LDLs which clog up the arteries). The more you walk, the more your HDLs will rise.

Walking Helps Prevent Osteoporosis

Walking is a perfect body massage. It improves muscle tone and strength and wards off aching joints and potential bone problems such as osteoporosis – the brittle bone condition prevalent in the elderly. As weight-bearing activity, walking boosts bone density. As bones gain mass, they grow sturdier and less prone to breaks.

Walking Can Reduce Back Pain

More than 90 per cent of people suffer from back pain at some point in their lives. Back and joints become less flexible, often caused by an inactive lifestyle and bad posture. Fitness walking helps by working the large muscle groups and strenghtening the postural muscles of the legs, buttocks, back and abdomen. “Taking a walk regularly is one of the best things you can do for your back,” says Dr John Regan of The Texas Back Institute.