In the last two months since I have started training someone who wanted to focus on walking over running I discovered quite a few training principles in common between the two activities. The upper-body posture and arm motions are the same, a strong core is important for both, and so is hip flexibility. The more I would research information about good walking and race walking form, the more surprising commonalities I found. For example, I would not have guess that there is such a thing as overreaching in walking too... I might talk about these in another post.
Recently, I had the honour to be invited by the North Shore Women Centre to host a workshop for a group of mainly walkers with a few runners. It was a great opportunity for me to share what I knew about good posture and injury prevention. I also got introduce for the first time a quick warm up and cool down routine I had adapted to apply to both walkers and runners. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well received it was among walkers. Interestingly, nearly all of them were suffering from pains and recurring injuries and they were happy to discover that a dynamic stretching routine could help prevent them.
Recently, I had the honour to be invited by the North Shore Women Centre to host a workshop for a group of mainly walkers with a few runners. It was a great opportunity for me to share what I knew about good posture and injury prevention. I also got introduce for the first time a quick warm up and cool down routine I had adapted to apply to both walkers and runners. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well received it was among walkers. Interestingly, nearly all of them were suffering from pains and recurring injuries and they were happy to discover that a dynamic stretching routine could help prevent them.
Click on the image below to see the slideshow presenting the stretches: