🚶‍♂️ Why Power Walking Trumps Jogging for Men Over 40

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Why Power Walking Trumps Jogging for Men Over 40

At Modern Fitness Report and RE Fitness, we often recommend power walks, incline fast-pace walks, or StairMaster sessions as primary cardio options for our clients. You might wonder why we lean towards these methods instead of the seemingly more intense jogging.

Let's dive into the reasons behind this approach, especially considering our reader base of men over 40.

1. Joint-Friendly Impact: As we age, our joints become more susceptible to wear and tear. Power walking provides an excellent cardiovascular workout while minimizing the impact on your knees, hips, and ankles.

2. Muscle Preservation: Intense, prolonged cardio-like jogging can lead to muscle catabolism – the breakdown of muscle tissue. For men over 40 who are already fighting against natural muscle loss (sarcopenia), power walking offers a better balance of calorie burn without sacrificing hard-earned muscle mass.

3. Sustainable Intensity: Power walking allows for longer-duration workouts at a moderate intensity. This "fat-burning zone" approach is often more effective for fat loss.

4. Lower Risk of Injury: The lower-impact nature of power walking significantly reduces the risk of common running injuries like shin splints, plantar fasciitis, and stress fractures.

5. Improved Posture and Core Engagement: Proper power walking technique encourages an upright posture and engages the core muscles, which can help counteract the effects of sedentary work environments common among men over 40.

While jogging certainly has its benefits, for our target demographic of men over 40, power walking and its variations offer a more sustainable, joint-friendly, and effective approach to cardiovascular fitness. It's about working smarter, not necessarily harder, to achieve and maintain your fitness goals for the long haul.

Why Embracing Imperfection Is The Key To Results

Recently, I got a great question from one of the clients I am coaching: “As a coach, what's the most common pitfall you notice among your clients?“

Surprisingly, it's not a lack of motivation or knowledge but perfectionism. Many clients start their fitness journey with an "all or nothing" mindset, aiming for 100% adherence to their program. However, life inevitably throws curveballs, as it always does – missed workouts, unplanned meals out, or busy weeks at work.

While these hiccups barely impact physical progress, they can derail some clients mentally. The perfectionist mindset makes them feel like failures for not sticking to the plan exactly, often leading to giving up entirely.

Our most successful clients are those who embrace flexibility. They navigate travel, social events, and unexpected challenges by making the best choices possible in each situation. Most importantly, they return to their routine seamlessly, treating these events as normal parts of life rather than program-ending failures.

Remember, consistency over time trumps perfection in short bursts. Your fitness journey is a marathon, not a sprint. In the end, you can control what you can control, and making the best out of imperfect hiccups is the key to long-lasting progress.

Beyond the Paleo Pitch: Evaluating Ancestral Diets

I'm sure you know that many diets are promoted and sold based on the premise that they are based on how our ancestors ate. But does that matter? Let's dive in.

The idea behind ancestral eating, often called "Paleo" or "primal" diets, is that our bodies are best adapted to eat what our prehistoric ancestors consumed. While this concept is intriguing, we have influencers and companies promoting different types of ancestral eating, from eating whole foods to eating just meat.

Here are the Pros of Ancestral-Style Eating that we agree with:

• Emphasizes whole, unprocessed foods

• Often leads to reduced sugar and refined carbohydrate intake

• Encourages consumption of nutrient-dense foods

Considerations to keep in mind:

• Our ancestors' diets varied greatly depending on geography and season. Some in colder regions ate higher in meat, and others in warm climates had higher in plant diets.

• Modern foods, even "ancestral" ones, are very different from their prehistoric counterparts due to mass production, breeding, and changes in the soil used.

• Our ancestors ate to survive, not for longevity. It is essential to cross-check and improve the ancestral way of eating with the outcomes of new scientific research.

Any diet that eliminates processed foods, refined carbs, and excess sugar is likely an improvement over the standard American diet. However, don't immediately buy into the ancestral-style promotion of a diet. Dig deeper to see exactly what it recommends.

A balanced approach focusing on whole foods while limiting saturated fats is a good baseline for judging any diet plan. Remember, while ancestral eating patterns offer valuable insights, modern nutritional science provides important benefits, too. The ideal approach combines the wholesome simplicity of traditional eating with evidence-based contemporary nutrition research.

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Publisher: Ryan Engel

Editor: John K.

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