By Robert Heller, MD — Co-Founder and Medical Director, Juvelixir
Patients used to apologize to me for walking.
I would ask what they were doing for movement and get a slightly sheepish answer: well, I only walk. Only. As though walking were what you admitted to after the gym membership lapsed.
I never once thought less of that answer. After sixty years of watching people age in front of me, I came to think it was frequently the better one.
The program you will quit, and the habit you will keep
I saw a great many ambitious exercise plans begin in my exam room. I saw comparatively few of them reach a second year. The pattern was so consistent it stopped being interesting: an intense program starts, something ordinary interrupts it — a trip, a stretch of work, a mild injury — and the program does not survive the interruption, because it was never built to be interrupted.
Walking survives interruptions. It requires no facility, no equipment, no block of time you have to protect from your own calendar, and no recovery from itself. A person who walks can walk on a bad week, at a bad hour, in a strange city, at any age I have ever treated.
The best exercise is not the most efficient one on paper. It is the one still happening in ten years. That comparison is rarely run honestly, because the impressive program always wins on paper and the walk always wins in the chart.
The three things I asked people to add
None of them change what walking is. They make it slightly harder to write off.
1. Put it on a hook
Attached to something you already do without deciding — after breakfast, after you park, before the evening news. A walk that depends on you feeling like it is a walk that competes with everything else in your day, and it usually loses.
2. Find some hills, or some stairs
A flat route is fine. A route with a rise in it asks a bit more of your legs and your breathing without asking anything more of your schedule. Most people can find one within a few blocks of home.
3. Carry something, sometimes
Groceries, a pack, a bag of soil for the garden. Load-bearing is the piece walking does not supply on its own, and it is the piece I most wanted my patients to keep. Not for how it looks — for what it lets you carry up your own stairs at eighty-five.
What this is really about
Independence. Not fitness, and not aesthetics. In sixty years I never saw much turn on whether a person’s exercise was optimally programmed. I saw a great deal turn on whether they could still move through the world on their own terms — carry the bag, take the stairs, get up from a low chair without a plan.
That capacity is built in an unglamorous way, on ordinary days, by people who are not tracking it.
Where a supplement fits into this
Underneath, and afterward. Juvelixir is a dietary supplement — nutritional support for adults who are already doing this work. Nothing in it makes you walk, and I would be skeptical of a bottle that suggested otherwise. The walk is the intervention. Everything else is on top of it.
If pain, breathlessness, or unsteadiness is what is keeping you from walking, do not work around it with advice from a column. Bring it to your own physician. Some of the most useful appointments I ever had began with a patient saying they had stopped going out for their walk.
Read what I ask about before I ask about supplements →
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article is for general educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Individual experiences vary. Talk with your doctor or pharmacist before starting any new supplement or making changes to your diet, exercise, or sleep routine, especially if you take medication, have a health condition, or are pregnant or nursing.