An Introduction to Nordic Walking with Benjamin Kuharik, Exercise Specialist

Podcast Transcript

John Horton: Hey there, and welcome to the Health Essentials Podcast. Today, we're going to talk about walking. But not your basic one-foot-ahead-of-the-other type of stroll. No, no, no. We're going to look at how you can kick walking up a few notches on the physical fitness meter by adding what amounts to fancy sticks. I'm John Horton, your host and wing man as we wander into the world of Nordic walking.

Our guide on this expedition is exercise specialist Ben Kuharik, one of the many experts at Cleveland Clinic who stops by our weekly podcast to offer tips to help you live a little healthier. So put on your walking shoes, double knot those laces. Let's get started on this journey with Ben.

Ben, great to have you back on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Ben Kuharik: Absolutely excited to be here, John.

John Horton: Let's jump right into Nordic walking. What is it?

Ben Kuharik: So Nordic walking is just a type of exercise that is just growing in popularity, and you're using poles to help propel yourself forward.

John Horton: They look like cross-country ski poles, right?

Ben Kuharik: Essentially. And, diving a little bit into the history of it, was just basically a way in the off-season when you couldn't utilize snow to train and keep up your endurance for cross-country skiing, and now it's becoming a little thing in and of itself that people are starting to use.

John Horton: Is it better than just regular walking?

Ben Kuharik: It's just something different. It uses a little bit more of your upper body in walking and gets blood flowing there. Takes a little bit of the impact away from the lower body, but it does transfer a little bit more into the upper body, so some people can find a lot of benefit from that. Some people with shoulder injuries, things like that, might want to avoid it.

John Horton: One of the big benefits of Nordic walking is just there's an increased calorie burn, right?

Ben Kuharik: Anywhere between 18 to 67 percent more calories being burned, which is a pretty big number.

John Horton: A huge number.

Ben Kuharik: Absolutely. When you're utilizing muscles, your heart has to pump it to the targeting area. In which case, when you're walking, it's almost entirely lower body. There's a little bit of upper body movement, but not a ton. But now, your heart has to pump blood to lower extremities and upper extremities. So for it to go both directions like that, you're just burning a lot more calories to sustain the pace.

John Horton: Yeah. Well, it sounds like Nordic walking, basically, it's what amounts to a full-body workout.

Ben Kuharik: Yeah, it's getting shoulders and back involved, especially a little bit of your arms and triceps, things like that. So it can help tone those a little bit, on top of the burning calories. And also, you can keep a higher pace than just normal walking. So this is a way that's awesome because you're going to be walking a little bit faster, and because it's less stress on your joints, you're able to do it for a longer period of time without accumulating as much fatigue.

John Horton: By adding in those poles and having those extra elements that are stabilizing yourself, it takes just a little bit of stress off of those joints.

Ben Kuharik: No, every step is accumulating just a little repeated stress in the same spot over and over and over. So, if you can even take 10, 20 percent of that stress from your knees and just get it away from that, then it goes a long way.

John Horton: Let's talk too about balance. You get a little older, you start worrying a little more about maybe falling or whatever. That's one of those things that can help keep you a little more stable when you're out.

Ben Kuharik: Yup. It helps with stability big time. But also, it helps with your posture because we have that forward-leaning posture or the forward head posture, and when you're utilizing the poles, it forces you into a more upright position. And poor posture often leads to losing balance, things like that. So on top of just having better balance while you're using it can create a habit to have just more balance when you're not using it as well.

John Horton: All right. So to summarize here, we're looking at Nordic walking. You can have a bigger calorie burn, less stress on your joints, you can go faster, you can go farther, better balance and it's going to help your posture. That's a lot of good stuff.

Ben Kuharik: Oh, yeah. I think everyone should at least give it a try. See if you like it. It's relatively, you can get pretty inexpensive, so you can just usually find them anywhere, Amazon, some Walmarts have them.

John Horton: This isn't something where you can just go out into the woods and find two sturdy sticks. You need a very specific piece of equipment to do this.

Ben Kuharik: It's designed specifically to help propel you forward. The angle and the tips help with a forward motion, and they're also extremely light because over time, you're picking it up a couple of hundred times, so if you try to do it with something like a stick, your shoulder is going to get tired very quickly. There are really expensive pairs for people who are avid with it, but you can find pretty cheap ones as well.

John Horton: All right. Now, you had mentioned the tips. I know when I was bopping around looking at things, it seems like there are some tips that have a little pointy bottom that would be good if you're on a trail or a soft surface. And then, there's some that also have rubber tips if you're on a paved surface.

Ben Kuharik: Yeah. They utilize different attachments like that. You can just get one stick and get a couple different tips. There are some that generally, you can use for whatever terrain. So if you're just trying it out, that's where I would go. I wouldn't get too technical with all the nuances with it. But yeah, they have a couple of things that are interchangeable like that.

John Horton: When you buy these poles, they have a wrist strap, and that's real essential to the overall process, right?

Ben Kuharik: Yes. Because if you're walking for an hour at a time, you don't want to have your hand constantly clamping down. And that's a one big thing with bike riding that gets me and starts to bug my wrist because you're constantly gripping as hard as you can and you're fatiguing all those muscles. So with the wrist strap, as you're propelling forward, you grab it and push it into the ground, and then, as you step, you'll let go so you're not going to overwork all the small muscles in your hand that can't take too much fatigue.

John Horton: OK, all right. Well, now, it sounds like we're getting a little bit into the form, which is actually where we are going to go next.

Ben Kuharik: You're not going to have to relearn walking.

John Horton: Good news.

Ben Kuharik: You can pick it up relatively quickly, easier than riding a bike, I would say. And there's two main ways of doing it. There's reciprocal, which, that's just opposite arm and leg, which is how we naturally walk already. Now, there is another way that's a little bit more advanced, and it's just a little way to change it up, where you use the double pole and you would do it every time your left leg comes forward, you propel with both. And then you could do it every third step so you'll go left, step, step, right, step, step. But just starting out, I would say you just stick with the reciprocal movement, opposite arm and leg to help propel yourself.

John Horton: OK, all right. And one of the key things here, I know with the videos I've watched and the tutorials, it seems like you're supposed to use just a normal arm swing. I think when people think about having a hiking pole, you're putting that pole out ahead of you and sticking your arms out. That is not Nordic walking, correct?

Ben Kuharik: Correct. You want just your natural gate. You don't want to push it, and you're not using your arms to just totally take the brunt of everything. It should just be natural movement, it's to assist your legs, it's not to take over.

John Horton: There are tutorials online like crazy. There's a 10-step technique developed by the, I think it's the International Nordic Walking Federation, although they go by INWA because I think they were an association before. It sounds like that's one of the big groups as far as getting tips and learning how to do this.

Ben Kuharik: Yeah. So with their 10-step program, you have to learn from a certified Nordic Walking Coach, and you can find that actually on a website ANWA, that's the American Nordic Walking Association. You can just go to their website and look it up, and actually, everyone who's certified, it'll show where they hold their practice so you can find something near you. The 10-step process is not actually just posted somewhere that you can utilize it.

However, you can just simply go to YouTube, look up a tutorial on it, and there's plenty of straightforward ones that you could just get to get started.

John Horton: All right, fabulous. That's something to go look for. So anything else that we missed.

Ben Kuharik: I recommend everyone at least tries it. You don't have a lot to lose, and you got a lot to gain.

John Horton: Ben, a thanks as always for coming onto the show. We appreciate your time.

Ben Kuharik: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

John Horton: So there you have it. Turning a daily walk into a Nordic walk can give you a full body calorie-burning workout. Plus, I'm guessing that those walking poles can be a great conversation starter when you meet somebody out on the trail. Till next time, be well.

Speaker 3: Thank you for listening to Health Essentials, brought to you by Cleveland Clinic and Cleveland Clinic Children's. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, or visit clevelandclinic.org/hepodcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to replace the advice of your own physician.