Let the Idea Behind Japanese Walking Enliven Your Bicycling

By Kevin Kolodziejski 

“A fish is not a monkey.”

While you may be surprised to see those six words at the start of a Road Bike Rider article, an even bigger shocker to me is how frequently we fail to integrate the essential idea behind them into our rides. For any gaga grammarian who considers The Chicago Manual of Style an absolute page-turner, an equally disturbing discovery is the use of quotation marks with those words. Yes, I’m well aware that recalling someone’s ordinary ones does not require that, but that’s just the point. If you honestly apply those ordinary words to your rides, you can enliven them and make them far from ordinary.

And if you don’t, you just might find yourself sending out a cordial-yet-critical email to a health and fitness columnist to tell him you found the workout he suggested in last week’s article to be way too tough. I know, for I received such an email years ago. I wrote back cordially enough but also a bit critically, reminding the guy of the caveat contained in the article. If we keep to the fish-and-monkey analogy, it is something akin to “those who are aquatic and limbless should never attempt to scale a tree.”

In other words, fish need to remember to stay under water.

What You Need to Remember

Likewise, you need to remember your abilities and your limitations in order to avoid all sorts of cycling frustrations. I need to remember them, too. Though you’d think by now I would’ve come to terms with no longer being able to do some of the rides I did 10 years ago, that fact still frustrates me to no end. Until, that is, I recall those six ordinary, yet extraordinaire words.

A fish is not a monkey.

Which is the underlying thought behind the experiment published in the July 2007 issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings that has given rise to a workout that’s now known via social media as Japanese walking. And now would seem like the time to explain why you should care even the slightest bit about this. After all, a walker is not a biker.

But neither one does either one with the goal of becoming frustrated. And whether you do your workouts in rubber-soled or carbon-soled shoes, an interval’s an interval, my friend.

An Interval’s an Interval and More

The aforementioned experiment began with 246 Japanese adults between the ages of 56 and 69 being randomly placed into three groups, one of which was a control group that did no walking. A second group took at least 8000 or more steps a day for four or more days a week at a pace at about half of “peak aerobic walking capacity,” which is essentially the same as 50 percent of VO2 max. The researchers named this “moderate-intensity continuous walking training,” and according to AI, the minimum amount of time someone in this group walked this way is five hours and 20 minutes a week. That’s important to note because the participants in the third group worked out by the watch, and some spent as little as two hours a week doing so.

But their time was spent doing “high-intensity interval walking training.” While this training may not strike an ambitious biker as being high in intensity, it certainly did alternate the intensity level. This group walked for three minutes at 40 percent of peak aerobic walking capacity, three minutes at 70 percent of peak aerobic walking capacity (a rate that accelerates breathing to the point where it’s hard to finish a typical sentence), and then continued the pattern for at least 30 minutes for a minimum of four days a week.

Five months later, the researchers redid the baseline tests on the 139 participants who remained in the study to the end. Those in the alternating-intensity group had lowered their resting systolic blood pressure more so than the continuous-but-moderate-intensity group. The alternating-intensity group also increased their peak capacity for walking by 9 percent, a “significantly greater” increase when compared to the other group — even though that group spent significantly more time walking. Moreover, when compared to their baseline strength tests for isometric knee flexion and knee extension, the alternating-intensity group had improved on average by 17 percent and 13 percent.

The ‘Magic’ in Doing Intervals

While these statistics are all well and good and attest to the efficacy of Japanese walking, there’s another element to the 2007 study that makes starting this article with the “a fish is not a monkey” saying apropos. It’s what Kevin McGuinness, a physical therapist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC., shares with Fran Kritz in a Verywell Health article. That the researchers only used three-minute intervals because the older participants became too tired doing longer ones.  It leads McGuinness to say, “There is probably nothing magic about the three-minute intervals.”

Yet there is a type of magic inherent in the underlying idea of doing alternating-intensity intervals for any type of exercise unless, perhaps, you rock climb without ropes or scuba dives in caves. Exercisers are creatures of habit. So unless your cycling is done with the sole purpose of preparing you for racing (and you’re being well-coached, at that), you probably do — especially when riding alone — too many moderately paced rides.

So the next time you’re in the middle of a solo effort that’s moderate and less than uplifting, do something similar to intervals to enliven it. Maybe something like this.

Sprint for a landmark, soft-pedal for a while, and then go pretty hard up that hill you usually go around.  Recover. Use your little ring only on that long flat road by the river where you normally turn a 53×15 and see how fast a cadence you can keep while keeping in good form. Ride as you feel after that; just make sure to keep alternating the pace and the degree of effort.

And keep saying to yourself that if it feels right, it is.

Because, after all, a fish is not a monkey.

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Kevin Kolodziejski began his writing career in earnest in 1989. Since then he’s written a weekly health and fitness column and his articles have appeared in magazines such as “MuscleMag,” “Ironman,” “Vegetarian Times,” and “Bicycle Guide.” He has Bachelor and Masters degrees in English from DeSales and Kutztown Universities.

A competitive cyclist for more than 30 years, Kevin won two Pennsylvania State Time Trial championships in his 30’s, the aptly named Pain Mountain Time Trial 4 out of 5 times in his 40s, two more state TT’s in his 50’s, and the season-long Pennsylvania 40+ BAR championship at 43.