Wild Stride
Nordic walking boosts workout
By Tim Jones
Walking for exercise is self-limiting. If you are overweight or out of shape, walking regularly starts rebuilding your fitness level, but you may quickly reach a plateau: Stride as far and as fast as you comfortably can and your heart rate still goes only so high. You can maintain fitness, but you can’t improve.
Once you’ve plateaued, you can jog or run (potentially hard on your knees and back), walk up and down hills, or carry extra weight. Or, you can try Nordic walking—using specially designed poles and a specific walking technique to mimic cross-country skiing on bare ground. Nordic walking started in Finland as dry-land training for cross-country skiers. Marketing by Exel, Leki, and Fittrek (the major manufacturers offering poles designed for Nordic walking) helped turn it into a full-blown fitness craze in Europe and a minor movement in the U.S. ARTICLE
LEARNING TO WALK
by Tim Jones
It was a breezy, cool fall day on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee in Meredith, N.H. when I learned how to walk. Nordic Walk, that is.
Never heard of Nordic Walking? Not surprising. It's big in Europe where it was invented as bare-ground training for cross-country skiers. But it hasn't really caught on here, yet. ARTICLE
August 22, 2008
Learning to walk the Nordic way. click for full story
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