We often talk about the benefits of Sport Walking and how it can give you all you need to get fit and have adventures. So you might think that we only want you to go Sport Walking and to do nothing else. Well you’d be wrong!
Although Sport Walking on its own can take care of pretty much all your fitness and endurance needs, there are benefits to be had by mixing things up a bit. This is where Cross Training comes in but in the context of Sport Walking, unlike simply pursuing a number of different sports for the sheer enjoyment, the objective is to use other activities to get a specific training benefit that can help or improve your walking form. It’s about adding something extra on top of what you might get from simply walking. So let’s look at some common options and how they can help.
Running
The most obvious activity to add to your Sport Walking training is running – it’s Sport Walking’s closest relative. Running is a higher intensity activity than walking and so by running, you’ll be gaining fitness more quickly. Now, quite often, people go Sport Walking specifically because they don’t like running (we’re quietly raising our hands here too) but this is not about running because you like it, it’s about understanding how it can help you and then finding a way to incorporate it into your training activity.
The most advantageous option with running is to switch some of your Sport Walks to ‘run/walks’. This could be considered interval training – where you go hard for a short time and then recover at a lower work rate – and it could, also, count as ‘Fartlek’, which is a term for mixing speeds in a freestyle way by feel. For using running as intervals, you’d want to be guided by a watch, so that the running and walking segments are of a clearly defined duration – perhaps running for 30-60 seconds, followed by walking fast for 3 minutes to recover. For Fartlek, simply walk normally and then burst into a run when you feel like it, continuing for as long as you feel that you can.
We routinely use run/walks in a Fartlek style for our weekday training sessions and it’s a great workout. The key reason for using running is that it’s faster and so your training takes less time but you still get the strong outcomes you’re looking for. For us, we usually run the flat and downhill parts of the route and walk the uphill and ‘false flat’ segments. We also walk flat parts if we don’t feel ready to run again.
By mixing running and walking in this way, you can increase the rate at which your fitness improves because you’re building more intensity into your sessions but you need to be careful that when you walk, you’re not walking too slowly or easily because you’re tired from the running. You want to try and maintain a strong effort throughout, so it’s comparable with having a fast walk, it’s just that you mix in some running to add more intensity at certain places.
As well as benefiting your fitness, running also benefits your joints and bones. While this may seem counter intuitive to anyone who has experienced knee pain when running, running has been shown specifically to benefit bone density and, also, to strengthen your joints, however the impact could potentially create knee pain if you have an underlying issue or weakness somewhere. As with many things, there is the overall positive effect but some might experience negative effects if their bodies have some kind of issue that, perhaps, is only revealed when starting to run!
We’d recommend adding running into your Sport Walks once or twice a week, at least initially, during your shorter weekday sessions. This is so that you’re not going so far and can afford to invest the extra effort running demands. The benefits will be that: you get your session done more quickly, leaving more time for other things during the working week (when time is tight), you’ll be doing good work for your bone health and you’ll be improving your aerobic capacity for your normal Sport Walks.
Cycling, Mountain Biking & Gravel Riding
Cycling is a superb complementary activity to build into your overall training as a Sport Walker. Not only is it great fun and a wonderful way of traveling through the landscape, any two wheeled machine will help you improve your walking fitness and, in particular, build muscle strength.
Road cycling or gravel riding on a road style bike with drop handlebars will give you a really good leg workout. It’ll build strength in your Glutes, which are a key driver in Sport Walking and it’ll also strengthen your Quads and Hamstrings. It’ll give you an aerobic workout too and bring fitness benefits in the same way as running does because you’re working at a higher intensity than walking but the beauty of cycling is that you have that fallback position of being able to freewheel to recover if you overdo it.
Mountain Biking, especially on more technical terrain, even if it’s not especially difficult to ride, is equally as good for your fitness and leg muscles but it also adds core strength because of the greater physicality of movement that comes when riding trails on a Mountain Bike.
All styles of cycling benefit Sport Walking and it’s an excellent supplementary activity that you can do on your ‘off days’ – when you’re not Sport Walk training because it’s much easier to manage your effort on a bike than it is when running and you can use a strong cycling sessions as a full leg strength workout, instead of using weights at the gym.
Swimming
Swimming might seem like an odd bedfellow to Sport Walking but it’s all about cardio, rather than leg effort, so building in a swim once or twice a week on your off days can help build aerobic capacity.
It’s all about the breathing, so to gain a benefit from swimming, you want to use a technique that immerses your head in the water or that you can do at a higher intensity. Just tickling the water and slowly progressing down the lane isn’t going to cut it for the average Sport Walker. You want to be swimming strongly and if you can do front crawl all the better, as the restricted breathing is great for improving your breathing efficiency.
Stand Up Paddleboarding
SUP is the hottest watersport around at the moment (don’t worry, something else will be along in a minute to steal its thunder). SUP’s strengths are that it’s easy to get on the water and, for a great many people, it feels safer than sitting in a kayak. If you fall off, you just clamber back on board!
What SUP brings to the table for Sport Walking is that it’s one of the very best activities for building titanic core strength. You might wonder what having strong core muscles has to do with Sport Walking but the fact is that holding a strong upright form throughout any long activity is wholly dependent on core strength. If your core muscles aren’t strong enough, by the end of a long challenge, you can be slumped and struggling to stand upright.
This is bad for your posture, it’s bad for your back health and it’s something every Sport Walker should focus on. Walking strength comes from overall strength in the whole body, not just the legs. You need your upper body to be strong and resilient, just as you need your legs to be able to take whatever the trail throws at them.
So doing ‘core work’ – strengthening your abs, doing the plank etc – this is all just as important as walking training and if you can get these benefits while being immersed in nature paddling down a quiet river or along the coast, why wouldn’t you?
If you want to take it to the next level, you can also try SUP Yoga! Performing Yoga moves while balancing on a paddleboard turbo charges all the benefits you’ll get from doing Yoga in the first place.
Yoga or Pilates
Back on dry land, doing Yoga or Pilates is another great activity that will support your walking and make you stronger and more supple. The key benefits of both are mainly focused around your core and your muscular strength, perhaps as an alternative to weight training.
If you can build some kind of Yoga or Pilates session into your schedule once a week, you’ll be doing good work to support your body during your Sport Walks.
You may be wondering why we haven’t mentioned weight training in this article but the thing is that weight training falls under strength and conditioning, which is an element of physical training for Sport Walking itself. The key thing with Cross Training is that you do different sporting activities, rather than different types of physical training, to gain that variety.
There are so many other activities that we could list and all of them will have some kind of benefit to your Sport Walking. Doing different things is good in itself. Variety helps prevent repetition injury and each activity will work the body in a slightly different way, building overall resilience and keeping your muscles in good shape.
So, while it’s important to keep a regular schedule of Sport Walks, so that you can improve your technique and build your confidence to take on challenges, adding in different activities will really help you to make faster progress. Initially, try to pick a couple that you can do on your ‘off days’, so that you don’t miss a walking session but as you get fitter and stronger, you can tactically replace the odd walking session in your main schedule with another activity like cycling or run/walking, as long as you’re going for the same distance, as this will increase the intensity of your effort and add fitness and strength benefits.
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