The Potent Benefits of a Morning Walk Around Your Neighborhood

Top Tier Greetings My Tribe,

Stright to it then with three amazingly potent, easily attainable, life improving benefits.

1. Builds a strong, healthy morning ritual that works on multiple fronts-physical, mental and emotional. PHYSICALLY you are getting your body moving Tribe! How awesome is that? circulating fresh blood that is intermingling with the crisp air (try to stay off main roads, as the auto traffic will deteriorate the quality of the air very quickly). You’re getting that lazy lymph active. Lympht is so valuable once it kicks into overdrive. Finally, the neurological function involved with a healthy gait over years of consistent implementation leads to higher levels of mobility in our elder years.
2. EMOTIONALLY you feel clearer and more capable of linear thought due to the simplicity of solitutde in a world full of attention magnetics. This time of peace within a pandemic is unrivaled. That is why I am a major proponent of getting ourselves taken care of BEFORE we integrate our energy with the rest of the world’s energies. 30 minutes to be able to operate in a more emotionally stable state for ten hours sounds like a great investment to me.
3. MENTALLY we are more aware of self and surrounding. We feel invigorated and perceptive as if we have been boosted with some Hueman enhancer. Why is that? We are not running so we cannot attain that runner’s high, right? Wrong. The onset flush we feel of life and vigor comes from the metabolic shift. The shift from carbohydrates to fatty acids due to the aerobic exercise. In addition the healthy blood flow encourages the dillation of blood vessels which we feel and ascribe to this “runner’s high”. Mentally the “high” continues because this is where the endorphins come into play. I want to speak lightly on this area for the same reason I do in other recent Tribal Posts: To get you up and doing something as soon as possible with the clearest outline as to how and why.

Bonus- MENTAL/PSYCHOLOGICAL aspects of almost all types of exercise are becoming more extensively documented. In essence, I want you to know that the body loves to be rewarded. Whether you know it or not. The body sets itself up for mental (and subsequently all other areas) for homeostasis by expecting; then striving to achieve; then pursuing to fruition. As simple as getting up morning after morning and doing some movement hygiene and then going for a 30 minute/2 mile walk develops around it a set of reward systems that chime off celebratory alarms from the time you do your first calf raise; to when you tie up your shoes; to when you step outside the door and turn down the block; to marking off those miles and returning home to stretch and elevate the rest of the day. So many valuable victories that the pleasure center of the brain really digs. Endorphins are released and the feel-good feng shui is facilitated.

Morning walks are generally much cooler or colder depending on your location. This produces stress like responses in the body (Good stress by the way) known as hormesis. The specific stress induced by the sudden and endured drop in environmental temperature sends a cascade of signals from the autonomic nervous system that, due to radiation and convection of our core heat when we walk outside, fires up our hypothalamus which triggers responses to maintain homeostasis. Whew! I know it is a mouthful but the power in this region of our brains to help us become more resilient and healthy without having to lift a weight or shop for expensive diet plans cannot be overstated. Just get outside and allow the work your ancestors did all those millenia ago to provide you with a gateway to your highest health potential.

Aerobic exercise and its reputable effect on the way our body metabolizes fat can’t be overlooked. When we engage in slow steady-state cardio we are using our (oxi)dative pathway. This simply means our body is using (oxy)gen as its main form of energy by interacting with our stored fat/lipids. In contrast to this form of exercise would be high-intensity interval training which can access sizeable amounts of lipid storage for energy though its bulk of caloric power comes in from (glyco)gen stores. Thus the term for that pathway is the (glycol)ytic pathway. Walking and super slow jogging are some of the easiest ways to get the detoxifying benefits of exercise as well as the cardiovascular improvements necessary to sustain optimal health as Huemans.

Stay Healthy Tribe,

Peace