Power Walking With Weights. A Comprehensive Look at How Weighted Power Walking Can Boost Fitness, Increase Strength, and Enhance Your Quality of Life
"Power walking is better than sex."
— Me
🎉 How Lucky For You!
You've just landed on a blog post where I'll introduce you to the absolute META of fitness exercises. The top of the heap. The cream of the crop. The safest, most efficient, life-changing workout you've never heard of.
Walking. With. Weights.
It's true what they say: "Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated".
Find out how the simple act of walking with hand weights can greatly benefit your physical and mental health (with video tutorials by yours truly!)
What IS Walking?
I bet you never considered walking something worth contemplating.
Walking is what humans evolved to do over the span of hundreds of thousands of years. It's the most optimized type of movement the human body can do. Walking, just as standing upright, are so important for survival, we can do them without any conscious thought: our brains actually developed separate areas, specialized at maintaining our sense of balance, Cerebellum being the prime example. That is how important walking is.
However, "unconscious" control over walking is mostly possible only when no extra load is present on the body. That's because the added weight usually noticeably changes the center of gravity of the combined system.
The good news is that the body and the brain are highly pliable and adaptable. If we keep walking with something moderately heavy regularly, over time we'll get more used to such movement, whereas letting go of the load would make previous weight-free movement easier.
So… If we walk all the time… What if we deliberately introduce challenge to this very activity with the goal of making ordinary walking effortless, and improve our fitness along the way?
That's the idea I'd like to share with you, along with the expected results and explanations, in the hopes that you'll find this activity as compelling and inspiring as I did.
A Full Year of Fitness with Ring Fit Adventure. Results and Tips and Tricks on How to Get the Most out of Your Workouts
Just... A handful of reps to go... C'mon…
A-a-and, there! Phew, that was an intense workout indeed!
Wait a minute... Wasn't there something I was working on?..
Oh, right! The blog post!
One Moment, Please...
It took a while to finish this post.
I was planning to publish it exactly a year past the previous one with the goal of showcasing what kind of progress one might expect over a similar timespan doing 2-3 Ring Fit workouts a week. As I still play the game and the numbers keep changing, let's pretend it's still March 2021 — the month I took all screenshots and videos for this post — and use those as reference.
⭐⭐⭐ NEW: Don't miss my new article on Power Walking With Weights! It's a great way to level up your fitness results even further! ⭐⭐⭐
Ahem... Where Was I?
A Full Cycle Later
Well, 2020 sure was a year of... Interesting events, news and developments. As for me, it was also a year of getting back in shape thanks to a very special and exciting video game titled Ring Fit Adventure.
Join me today, as I share my experience with the game, the console, go though some of the personal mile-stones, and provide several tips and tricks along the way. Hopefully, by the end you'll be able to tell how exactly this product had improved the quality of my life and maybe consider doing the same.
Short and Sweet Ring Fit Adventure Review, Some Nintendo Switch Notes, and What the Hell Happened to Unity Engine!?
When I mentioned I was working on a Design Document for a third person semi-open world game to a good friend of mine several months ago, he immediately asked me whether I had played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario: Odyssey. Naturally, not being a Nintendo Switch owner, I had no such experience. "Get the console!" — he replied immediately — "You gotta check out what those Zelda and Mario games have to offer in the way of game mechanics and overall flow."
"Yeah, right..." — Was my instant reply — "Getting an overpriced piece of hardware powered by a microwave-grade Tegra X1 SoC with games that cost a fortune each? I'll pass."
And with that, I returned to working on the DD and various side-projects and forgot the conversation ever happened.
🎮 Click/tap here to skip my Unity rant and go straight to the Ring Fit Adventure review.
The pitiful state of the Unity game engine
By mid-February the DD was about 70% done and I considered installing a brand new version of the Unity Engine to start prototyping the basic ideas. I might dedicate a whole post to what I had to go through trying to install and use the latest version of the Unity Editor, but will keep it short for now:
Get your body ready for Motion Capture with 8 minute workouts
While the full 32-neuron MoCap suit is on its way, I've decided to get back in shape and get rid of those unsightly love handles and give my amorphous muscles some real whipping. After all, I am going to document the MoCap sessions and certainly wouldn't want to put you through the horror of watching some mushy amateur clumsily jumping around in tights.
Therefore a month ago I went back to my favorite series of workouts developed by Jaime Brenkus called "The 8 Minute Body system" released on VHS back in 1995. The series consists of several short training videos targeted at different parts of the body:
- Arms
- Abs
- Legs
- Buns
- And a general stretch/warm-up
Those are great routines which definitely work. For example it usually takes me about a month to a month and a half to get back in good shape, shave off those extra fat deposits and all of that – with less than half an hour of exercises. I usually don't do all of them and only focus on arms and abs with the following schedule:
- Monday: rest
- Tuesday: arms + abs (once a day)
- Wednesday: rest
- Thursday: arms + abs (once a day)
- Friday: rest
- Saturday: arms + abs (twice a day)
- Sunday: arms + abs (twice a day)
As you can see weekends are where it's at, this is where the whole upper body gets a real beating and shapes up nicely and in a very short time. I use free hand-held weights when doing arms to make sure it's not just aerobics but real strengthening exercises, and add more weights along the way based on the results.
You can find a playlist with all 8-minute workouts available for free on Jaime Brenkus' YouTube channel.
Now for a finishing note and a disclaimer: make sure to consult your doctor whether it's an appropriate activity for your body and supplement your diet with quality whey protein! Otherwise you'll be losing not just fat, but also lean muscle mass which you don't want!
Good luck on your path to the perfect MoCap body!