The world is full of exercise methods — so why walking?

For me, at least, it goes back a long way. When I was in elementary school and junior high, I lived in a remote area. To get to the school bus, it was either a 3-mile drive on a winding, rutted, dirt road or a walk down the mountain we lived halfway up. My mom always said it was a quarter-mile trek. Not sure how she knew that — we didn’t exactly have a pedometer or some GPS-related smartphone app back then.

At any rate, that’s what I did: Most days during the school year from third through eighth grade, I walked down a winding path through the woods and over a small stream to get to my bus stop. And at the end of the school day, I hiked back up. It took about 15 minutes down and more than twice that up, as I recall.

Fast-forward to my 20s, when I was looking to exercise more regularly to lose weight and feel healthier. Walking became my most frequent choice, whether on the treadmill at the Y or around my neighborhood.

I think walking appealed to me at the time because it didn’t feel like a workout. For that reason, it appealed to my lazy side.

But time and knowledge have shown me that walking is not lazy at all. The beauty of walking is that pretty much anyone can do it, without choreography, without special equipment. That makes it easy, and accessible. As the saying goes: Put one foot in front of the other…