Power walking helped me lose a lot of weight and got me started with exercise.
But in my early days of walking, I wasn’t yet a fitness professional, and I made some rookie mistakes that led to a painful bout of plantar fasciitis and other issues. Those mistakes included a lack of proper physical preparation before my walking workouts, and not utilizing recovery techniques afterwards.
If you’re also a walker or runner, it’s important to prepare your body for exercise, to help you have a better workout and most importantly to prevent injury.
Here is a simple routine of dynamic stretches to help you warm up. If the video is not appearing above, click here to see it on the Blue Cross NC Facebook page.
If you don’t have time to do them all, do the foot rolling and pick out a few of the foot and ankle exercises so that at least you’ll get in a little bit of warmup.
Use a foot roller
I start off every workout by rolling the bottom of my feet on a foot roller for about 30 seconds on each foot. This helps prepare your foot tissue for the impact of walking and movement, and can help prevent injury – plus as a foot massage it feels wonderful. If you don’t have one yet, you could use a tennis ball or frozen water bottle.
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