Books: Walking: The Ultimate Exercise for Optimum Health
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Tagged Under : burn calories, Excercise, health, healthy living, walking, work out
This was a tough audio book for me because I have mixed feelings about it. It’s short and sweet which is nice and the first hour has some really good information in it that will motivate you to walk which I think everyone should hear. However, the second hour, is a different story.
This audio book is narrated by Dr. Andrew Weil and athlete Mark Fenton. Dr Weil provides medical reasons for walking that will make you hate yourself for not doing it sooner. He brings up the issues of walking being thought of as a lesser activity because it’s not very modern, has no fancy equipment, and isn’t very scientific among other things but then goes on to talk about humans as bi-pedal with feet being the perfect design for this excercise and how all these reasons that waking is thought of as a lesser activity is why it’s good, in addition to being free and capable of being performed any where at any time.
Mark Fenton provides some insight on why walking is good as well, and then walks you through a warm-up, a walk at three different paces for 120, 135, and 150 steps per minute. The different paces are designed for different goals. The two crazy things about this part of the audio book is beat in the background and the amount of warm down time Mark prescribes for a walk whether its an hour long walk or just 5 minutes. The substantial amount of beat music in the background of the second part of the audio book is amazing. You’re supposed to time your steps with it. Mark even says, “just listen and if you fast forward, check back in, in about 10 minutes….” it was pretty crazy. Then the warm down just doesn’t end. Mark instructs the listener to do some very basic exercises over a long period of time. I know you can’t argue with the concept of warming up and warming down, but he says it’s great for a five minute walk. Does that mean if I park 7 minutes from the mall entrance that I need to warm up before I make the trek or I’m going to injure myself? It hasn’t happened in 33 years, why would it happen now that I’m taking up a solid walking program?
As previously mentioned, this audio book did have some good information in it from the Dr. In fact, I really liked what he said and am looking forward to getting hold of his other audio book called Healthy Aging. Then Mark’s portion of the book lacked substance and I feel was almost too basic, bordering on offensive, with how simple his information was but then again, maybe I didn’t see label that it was for beginners. All that said, I don’t know if this is worth paying a lot of money for. I’m sure both of these distinquished professionals which are both accomplished authors, have great material out there and I just don’t think this is their best work. It almost seems like the two guys decided to produce this one day over coffee and did so. Check it out if you can get it for free, other than that, look for other resources if you want to know more about walking.





