Best shoes for walking in Europe

Posted on 23 May 2013 by admin

So, you’re traveling to Europe for the vacation of your dreams and you’re clever enough to know you’ll be needing some comfortable walking shoes. Great!

I happen to have some specialist knowledge here, as I have walked in European cities and hiked in the countryside of several countries. Here’s what you need to know to pick the best walking shoes for Europe.

  • The best walking shoes for Paris are the same as good walking shoes for Rome and shoes for walking London. If you’re planning a hiking trip around the countryside, you’ll want something different.
  • If you want to blend in, you’ll want something dressier than giant white athletic shoes. You probably already know this, since you’re here doing research on shoes for European travel.

So, here’s what we’re looking for: Stylish walking shoes that are good for walking on concrete and cobblestones and won’t draw the undue attention of those who prey on tourists (like pickpockets). You need to ‘blend’. Good European walking shoe styles are oxfords, loafers, or nice sandals.In addition, these must be good shoes for long distance walking and above all, they must be comfortable.

Suggestions:

Women’s stylish walking shoes: try Mephisto, Clarks, Aravon, or Rockport. If I were packing a bag right now, I would include these black flats and these mary janes. If you’re the sort who will need dress shoes, you’ll need to pack a third pair of shoes for your European vacation.

Men’s shoes for walking in Europe: Try Keen (loafers), Sperry Top-Sider, or Merrell‘s less athletic looking shoes, like the loafers and oxfords.

Black, navy, or brown works great, though women could likely get away with pewter or cream and men wouldn’t go wrong with a nice tan. It would be best to avoid white or bright colors.

No matter which shoes you choose, wear them in gradually before you go – put at least 15-20 miles on your shoes in gradual steps. Even the best shoes might have a high seam or need a bit of stretching to be truly comfortable – and it’s better to find that out while you’re not treading the stones to the Louvre with a blister. Have fun!

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Preventing stress fractures from walking

Posted on 3 February 2013 by admin

If you’re developing a  fitness habit, the last thing you want is an injury like a stress fracture which can put you to the side for a month to 6 weeks. Talk about a habit-breaker.

So, how can you prevent a stress fracture? It’s not too difficult: wear decent footwear and build gradually. While I’m not an advocate of fancy shoes, one of the things fancy athletic shoes offer is cushioning, and since stress fractures are caused by repeated stress, cushioning can help prevent them. Of course, your feet were made for walking, without shoes. But not on cement or uneven rocky surfaces.

I developed my recent stress fracture through a great trifecta of problems: 1. I injured my heels and walked on the balls of my feet. 2. I did this in shoes with very thin soles, and 3. I did it walking on cobblestones. If I’d been walking on dirt or grass or even an asphalt surface, my feet wouldn’t have needed to flex quite so much in response to landing.

The last part of stress fractures is the sudden increase or change of your exercise. If you walk to the car in the driveway every day, it is not practical to suddenly begin walking 10 miles per day. It is more sensible to walk a few miles every day, skip a day, walk 10 miles, skip a day, walk a few miles every day and gradually add distance and duration. Gradually!

Don’t forget in your rush to get in shape that something so simple as rushing your fitness routine can sideline you for long enough that you give up. That is not the recipe for long term fitness! If you begin to develop foot or shin pain, try biking or swimming every other day until the pain subsides, because prevention is better than a cure!

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Real Life: Why preventing injury is better than not

Posted on 27 January 2013 by admin

Sometime in December, I buffed my scaly heels with one of those files made for removing scaly skin from your heels. And it worked beautifully. Until 2 days later when my newly smooth heel skin began to split open. Turns out I took off too much and didn’t moisturize enough. That was painful!

That could have been the end, if only I’d taken it seriously or done more than walk around on the balls of my feet – and not just a little. I kept up my 15km per day walking. The result? Stress fractures in my foot. Changing my gait without reducing the amount of walking I did broke my foot. If you came here wondering if you can get stress fractures from long distance walking, the answer is yes. Especially if you don’t take care of your feet.

That could have been the end of it if I had rested and bound up my foot, but then my heels healed and of course the dog doesn’t understand ‘broken foot’ so I kept walking, changing my gait again to accommodate the moderately painful fractured foot. The result? My lower back started to twinge. Back problems are a big no-no for me but my usual answer to a sore back is a good walk or 5.

I stretched through it but still didn’t do anything about the foot fracture and then a few days ago I woke up with rather severe tendonitis in my knee. This is a limiting injury – very painful and impossible to ignore. And if I don’t take care of this, it could cause a chronic or permanent injury. And nothing gets in the way of fitness like a chronic injury – particularly of the knee.

So my new plan is to treat the knee with RICE, and from now on I will take seriously any small injury which causes a change in gait – you can see how a simple thing can spiral out of control.

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Walking for weight loss: real life experience

Posted on 28 November 2012 by admin

I have discussed the potential to lose weight by walking previously. The facts are not encouraging – if you want fast weight loss or magic, a 15 minute stroll isn’t going to cut it.

But having recently acquired a dog and doubled my walking, it would be irresponsible to not share the weight loss side effects I’ve achieved.

Prior to getting the dog, I walked approximately 5-7 hours per week. Since getting the dog, I walk 2 hours per day plus an extra hour or two on the weekends. So about 15 hours per week. And in the month since I’ve gotten this dog, I have lost 4 kilos – around 10 pounds. I haven’t changed anything else – still eating the same. Just walking more. I don’t know how long this weight loss will go on – it will certainly level off sometime. But 10 pounds is pretty significant.

Still, who (else) has time to walk for 2 hours every day? Well, I would posit that most of us do – if we’re willing to sacrifice something else.

One option is to get treadmill and combine an hour of walking with your evening tv. They’re even making treadmill desks, which would enable you to walk for several hours without reducing productivity. It should be noted that such desks also require a separate purchase of a treadmill. When walking at your desk, you will not be walking at a high speed, you maintain a slow-moderate pace for an extended period of time. This is a very good technique for people who have joint problems because it’s low impact.

If you have a home office this is an excellent way to keep your fitness level up even though you don’t have extra time. If you work outside the home, consider asking your supervisor to authorize a trial – physical movement is a productivity enhancer, not a distraction. Gather your resources and show her how it will benefit the company. (Fit people don’t take as many sick days, for instance!)

As you know if you’ve been reading for long, I am a big proponent of outdoor walking for all the benefits it offers. But much as I love the outdoors, there’s no denying that it is better to walk whenever and wherever you can rather than get the ‘perfect’ situation.

Another way to put an extra hour of walking into your day is to park 20 minutes from your job site. Obviously, this is only appropriate if the area is safe and walkable – but if you work at a mall, you could easily park at the opposite end to your workplace and traverse the entire mall both to and from, incorporating extra exercise into your schedule with only a small sacrifice. Then you just have to have a brief 20 minute stroll at lunch and presto: you’re walking an extra hour every day.

Be creative! Get moving! You won’t be sorry!

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November, Here comes winter walking weather

Posted on 4 November 2012 by admin

Today, I’ll be talking about weather, walking, dogs, shoes and the winter blues aka ‘seasonal affective disorder’. I’m going to try to tie it all together. This is where my life is right now and you write what you know, right?

First up: winter walking footwear. November where I live is a month full of rain. There are moments of sun, but there are still puddles and mud. Having recently acquired a dog, I can no longer wait for the sunny moments to go out for a bit of exercise. In other words, I needed a decent pair of waterproof walking shoes. I don’t like boots, and I wanted something that I could wear around town without people thinking I was going hunting. I settled on the Bogs Rue – a slip on waterproof shoe.

I also considered the Charlot because they’re pretty cute but decided in the end I wanted a shoe rather than a waterproof boot.

Here’s my review: I love them. They are truly waterproof and I cannot stand having wet feet or socks. I have large feet and hammertoes, and these shoes are not going to cause any blisters because there’s plenty of room. Really good choice!

Next: walking, winter, and SAD. My mom can always tell when I’ve not been getting sun in my eyes because I get whiny. I start to moan about the rain and grey. What I’ve discovered is that I can tolerate any amount of rain and grey skies as long as I get 10 or so minutes of sunlight on my face every day. It’s important to note that while getting sun in your eyes is generally perceived as a bad thing, it’s vitally important to get a bit if you suffer from winter depression. You could use a full spectrum light box like this favorite from Philips – they work, and work well. The other option, though, is to get out and get a bit of exercise when the sun is peeking through. It doesn’t take much light to make a palpable difference in your mood. I find 10 minutes of sun with uncovered eyes is enough to keep me going until the solstice. Side note: it is no mystery why humans have celebrated the winter solstice since they figured out what it was.

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Exercise tracking as a motivational tool

Posted on 19 September 2012 by admin

Study after study shows that people who wear pedometers increase their activity without  other intervention. I’ll leave the ‘whys’ to them and just take it as a given that if you are given an easy way to track your walking or other exercise, you will incorporate more activity in your daily life.

For the record: most health agencies want all of us to take 10,000 steps every day. It’s considered the minimum for basic health. That counts every step – whether it’s going down the hall, shopping for groceries, or walking through the park. Every step counts but you don’t know how many you’re taking if you don’t count.

Which means that if you’re struggling to stay motivated to complete your new exercise walking program, it might be worth it to invest in a pedometer or other exercise tracking device.

Devices available run the gamut from simple to advanced.

A ‘hip pedometer’ will track your steps only when worn on your hip. You clip it onto a pocket and off you go. The Omron HJ-150 is a straightforward option for under $30. It doesn’t have any fancy add-ons: it tracks your steps each day and resets to zero at midnight.

For around the same price, the HJ-112 will track your steps whether it’s in a vertical or horizontal position.

Still under $30, you can choose a wristwatch style pedometer which also has a heart rate monitor – very useful if your fitness goals include heart rate goals. Reviewers often wish you could save the data from one workout to another (for tracking purposes) but in this case you get what you pay for. The Smart Health Digital Pedometer Heart Rate Watch is a basic pedometer and heart rate monitor worn on the wrist. It doesn’t have any other tricks.

If you want the Rolls Royce of exercise tracking devices, I point you to the Fitbit activity tracker. At nearly $100, it is much more expensive than the other options, but again – you get what you pay for. Fitbit measures your steps no matter if you clip it to your bra or belt or if you carry it in your pocket. It can even count how many stairs you climb! It also wirelessly communicates with your computer so that you can see your fitness activity over time. Further, it monitors sleep which can be very useful if you’re struggling. And if you want to, you can log meals – allowing you to track your food intake. It really has everything needed to revamp your life with as little struggle as possible.

The beauty of walking, as I say all the time is that you don’t have to buy anything. You don’t need a gym membership, special shoes, expensive clothes or even a pedometer. You don’t need it. But that doesn’t mean those things are useless – in the case of a pedometer or exercise tracker device, they can be very useful indeed.

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Why you should make SMART walking goals

Posted on 19 September 2012 by admin

Pretty much every ‘success’ coach will include some form of goal-setting training. And there’s a good reason – goals work. Humans respond to goals. Coaching yourself to success with your fitness target, therefore, will include goal setting. Here’s the free version of what a success coach will tell you.

Set SMART goals. SMART goals are:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic
  • Time Bound

So your walking goals should meet those criteria. This can take many forms. You might decide you want to ‘walk to the moon’. Taken literally, that’s not realistic – but if you consider that the moon varies between 356,400 km to 406,700 km from Earth, you could shape that into a smart goal. It’s specific. It’s measurable. It’s massive, but achievable. For most of us, it’s realistic. To make it time-bound, you have to set an ending date. I’m just going to say that even if you walk a lot, it’s going to take you around 10 years. Most of us will need a shorter term goal than that.

So maybe you make the goal of walking from coast to coast within a year. For the US, this is generally 3000 terrestrial miles (it’s shorter as the crow flies). That is a big but reasonable goal for one year: you’d need to walk 10 miles per day, taking 65 days off – or walk shorter distances (a bit over 8 miles) every day. Forrest Gump I’m not so I might stretch the date to 18 months.

It’s important to not forget that you have to ‘measure’ your exercise to reach your fitness goal. Exercise tracking can take many forms – you can walk a set path every day, wear a pedometer, or go further and take advantage of the technology available to us. Next time, I’ll be discussing exercise tracking in all its forms to help you decide which tracking method is best for you.

 

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Physical fitness and aging

Posted on 4 September 2012 by admin

My boss was 10 years older than me and told me that he was fine until he turned 40. The way he told it, he woke up 40 and in pain. I lived the next 8 years with trepidation, worried that I would wake up barely middle-aged and aching.

A few years later, my neighbor strapped a full 10 liter container to his back and headed up the mountain to visit his olives. I looked on in amazement. Nikos had been badly hurt – a stomach wound – when the Nazis occupied Crete. He barely survived, but barely is enough and was 90 when I met him. He visited his olives every day, a two km round trip with 20 pounds on his back.

It’s not always a choice, whether we will be 90 and fit or 40 and in pain, but there is much we can do to improve our chances. For one, Nikos had been doing that same mountain trip every day for ages. Probably since the proud and fierce Cretans threw the Nazis off the island. It is, naturally, easier to keep doing something than to start doing that thing.

One recently published study looked at people in their middle age (30s-50s), and then again in their old age (70s & 80s). They found that people who were ‘fit’ in their middle age halved their risk of chronic disease like heart failure and diabetes in old age.  More importantly, a 20 percent increase in fitness in middle age meant a 20 percent decrease of those chronic diseases. That means it’s never too late.

So how do we go about increasing our fitness, to stave off the ravages of aging? My rule of thumb is ‘do better than before.’ You can’t give up on a goal like that, because it’s pretty flexible. Am I fitter than I was before? Yes. Absolutely. There are ways to measure it – you can use a pedometer, check your blood pressure, or simply count the days you fulfilled your fitness goal. It doesn’t have to be a giant endeavor. It can be as simple as setting up your life so that daily routine gives you cause to be active. Some people golf, some visit their olives, I walk around. I often walk while looking for wild foods, but most often I walk to the grocery. Doesn’t matter really what it is, as long as it’s something you’re going to do and keep doing.

I don’t want to run marathons or compete in gymnastics when I’m 80. But I would very much like to feel happy visiting my olives up the mountain every day. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

I hope not. And so far it’s working. I passed that 40th birthday and have not suffered the dreaded body revolt my boss predicted so many years ago. Looks like I’m doing okay so far!

 

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What will walking do for you?

Posted on 29 July 2012 by admin

Facing yourself and realizing that you aren’t entirely pleased with what’s going on with your body can seem daunting, particularly if you’re at the very beginning of changing your life.

You want all that change to happen at once. Humans like instant gratification – actually, all animals like instant gratification. In this, we are not special.

You know that instant gratification is elusive, and you consider starting an exercise program but you don’t want to waste your time. You’re here, so you’re interested in walking as a form of exercise. So let’s talk about that – what can you expect from a walking exercise program? What will walking every day do for you? Can you lose all the weight you want to lose by walking? Valid questions – and I have the answers. Let me preface this by saying you’re probably not going to love these answers, because the reality of them will interfere with your natural ‘instant gratification’ drive. Still, making good decisions means you need good information and I’m going to give it to you.

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Walking every day offers many health benefits. For one, it classes you as an ‘active’ person rather than an ‘inactive’ person, and a recent research has added to the proof that inactivity causes death. If that sounds too grave, to ‘serious’, read the study or any of the others like it that tell us definitively that not being active will kill you.

Daily walking builds strong bones, too. This may not seem interesting to you if you’re young or don’t know anyone with osteoporosis, but that doesn’t make it unimportant. Walking is a weight bearing exercise, which is necessary to stave off osteoporosis and keep you from becoming frail as you get older.

A third benefit of regular walking is that it helps your body to better regulate your blood sugar. If you are ‘pre-diabetic’, have diabetic relatives, or otherwise suffer from blood sugar issues, daily walking can make a significant difference to your health.

Losing weight by walking is possible, but it will be slow. Further, while you can expect to lose 5, 10, even 20 pounds solely by walking, you will not lose 40 or more pounds. Why? Because you’d have to spend all of your time walking and most of us have to work, or study, or sleep.

A recent study of traditional hunter-gatherers (link), who do spend the majority of their days ‘active,’ showed that their daily caloric need was not significantly different than yours or mine. We all need about 2500 calories per day. What that means is that if you want to lose significant weight, you’re going to have to change what you eat.

This is not to say walking is worthless, or that you won’t lose weight – I have. I’ve lost 20+ pounds just by walking about an hour every day. But eventually you reach a point where the weight loss stops, because you’re not that much more active. To lose a significant amount of weight, you’ve got to change what you eat.

While this information is not the instant gratification you were perhaps searching for, it is all truth. Armed with this, you can start an exercise program that you won’t quit because you’re disappointed with the results.

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Thoughts on socks

Posted on 30 June 2012 by admin

I go through a lot of socks. I don’t know exactly how many miles I get out of a pair, but it doesn’t seem like many. Holes appear as if by magic.

I have occasionally pondered which are the best walking socks, but I generally just go with my standard cotton sports socks because it’s what I know.

To help us all, I’ve been investigating better socks for walking and I’ve found some great socks for women who walk – they fit, they wear well, they don’t leave you with damp or stinky feet, and the provide protection and support as much as a sock can. Below are 5 of the best walking socks for women available. Continue reading →

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