What Walking 7000 Steps a Day Actually Does for Your Body

0:00 Walking is one of the most powerful medicines. It lengthens your life, decreasing anxiety and depression, reducing cortisol. It's good for digestion, strengthening your immune system. If we just look at the research on steps, anything below 2,000 steps, which is one mile, you actually start seeing the risk of diseases going up. Then when you get up to about 4500 steps, which is a little over 2 miles, you start to see cardiovascular benefits. If you go a little more past 7,000 steps, you start seeing a lot more benefits, including living longer. One of the things that will nullify the benefits of walking is sitting too long and then thinking that I can go ride my bike around the block and that will be enough to counter that. Unfortunately, it's not quite true. Let's first talk about the benefit of what walking can do

0:45 to your blood sugar. Walking after a meal really will help any extra sugar that you ate. Of course, I know some people are going to go, "Wow, I can just eat more sugar and walk." Well, I'm not trying to put out that message. Another thing in the morning when you wake up with high blood glucose, especially if they're a pre-diabetic or a diabetic, walking can handle that too because you can go for a walk in the morning and burn off that excess glucose, which should be a very, very good thing because we don't want the glucose converting into fat. Walking activates your muscles, significantly improves depression because it's a low stress activity where you get a lot of oxygen. If we compare walking to drugs, let's take high blood pressure medication. Guess what? Walking lowers your blood pressure. As far as weight loss goes, yes, you're going to lose weight with

1:31 walking, especially in the the belly area, visceral fat. But when you exercise, you're going to be increasing muscle, and that weighs a little bit more than fat. Instead of focusing on weight loss, what I recommend you do is just measure your waist at the level of the belly button. You should see a significant decrease in belly fat. If you walk during a fast, you can improve your results greatly. This is why when you wake up in the morning and you don't eat, you fast until noon, you should walk in the morning. You'll get better benefits. Another tip with walking is if you walk briskly, you will have much better benefits. Even if we compare the same steps, if you're walking faster, your results are going to be better. Also, uh drinking a little apple cider

2:17 vinegar and some water, that can improve your ability to lose weight because what it does to your blood sugar. Of course, there's a lot of other things to do to increase more intensity when you're walking. Walk up a hill. You can walk upstairs. In 2017, there was a Japanese study which actually has amazing benefits. It can actually produce three times the results of lowering blood pressure, 10 times the results with leg strength. All you do is for three minutes you're walking fast and then for three minutes you're walking normal. And you simply go back and forth, back and forth five times. that specific type of walking for 30 minutes gives you more benefits than an hour and a half to two hours of just regular walking. Another tip that I would recommend is to walk backwards. It strengthens your knees and

3:03 ankles and hips and it apparently it improves more cognitive function when you do that. It also helps your balance. Of course, do this in a safe place. I wouldn't necessarily do this walking down the street in a city. Another uh thing that I recommend is nasal breathing when you're walking as much as possible because you can increase more CO2 which then makes your oxygen more efficient in your blood. Another really important purpose of walking to counter the stress of life. When I go for a walk, I do not bring my cell phone. I don't listen to music. I'm not watching videos when I'm walking. What I'll do is I'll use as many sense organs as possible. I'll be looking at trees. I'll be looking at different colors. I'll look at how bright it is or how cloudy it is. I'll look at the details of things on the ground. I try to really uh

3:50 focus in on listening to all these different sounds as long as I can. Then I'll shift to smelling different things. These are all things that help you get into the present. Sometimes it might take up to 30 minutes to an hour before I can achieve that. There's a couple other tips I want to tell you about walking. You can also uh do a form of hypoxia training, mimicking uh how athletes train at high altitudes. Since we're on the topic of athletes, I met this 70-year-old man who went from literally almost dying of a heart attack to being like a world champion sprinter. Let's just see what he says about sprinting as an exercise that is awesome for your body. I had flat feet my whole life. You got some data that sprinting

4:37 really helps to, you know, strengthen the arch and also allows for that spring. I'm doing sprinting up hills right now and it's amazing how my feet are responding and they're like putting back in that elastic band uh bypassing the actual loss of the arch. I'll tell you, hills. I do 100 meter hills uh once a week. Um after I've done all my warm up, that's like the beginning of a workout. I'll do 100 meters uphill. I walk it back at a slow pace. I run another one immediately. I do that six times. By the sixth time, you feel like you're like about to be crushed. Then I have an 8 minute break and then I start doing whatever the coach told me I had to do that day. Um but yeah, heels have

5:23 been fantastic. And you know running people most of us walk somewhat flatfoot but when you run short distance in a track you're running on your toes especially when you put your when you put your spikes on it's completely different physiological function. The biomechanics are completely different. But now back to hypoxia training. How do we do that naturally? All you have to do is periodically sync your breath with inhalation for three steps and exhalation for four steps. This is not an exact hypoxy method. It's a form of it. It's something I would do before this next thing I'm going to tell you. But it's a way of restricting oxygen to a certain degree. Then you can work up to every few minutes you're going to hold your breath for 5 to 10 seconds. Let me tell you some of the benefits

6:09 that can occur when you do this over a period of time. you're triggering certain genes in the body that compensate and make your body stronger, decreasing inflammation and even help improve your recovery. Let's talk about the mistakes with walking. Mistake number one, leaning too far forward because that's going to put pressure on your upper back muscles as well. Another mistake is wearing shoes that are very cheap or uncomfortable. Another mistake is not taking advantage of having your exercise get rid of the sugar. In other words, when you walk is important. The other thing is that some people get very enthusiastic and they overtrain. They go out for a a really long walk and they make this a habit of walking every single day over soreness. So, they're overtraining and I don't recommend that. That's a big mistake. You want to let

6:56 your body recover so it's not so sore. Now that I covered walking, there's another type of exercise to take your fat loss to the next level in just 11 minutes a day. Check out this video right now to learn how to do it. This one right there. Click it.