Walking slower? Your ears, not your knees, might be the problem
wsj.com
wsj.com
I can appreciate things better by moving slowly, with more intention, conserving my concentration and energy for matters of substance.
Why must moving slowly be stigmatised?
I am surrounded by people talking at such a high rate, they start responding before the other person's sentence or thought is completely expressed.
My value at work has become disentangling messes made by people failing to communicate effectively, and the first step in addressing that problem is always, slow down.
You will not get 10% further in life by going 10% faster. People moving quickly, failed at planning. The entire mystery of the universe is accessible to you in your current location.
Because, irrespective of your individual case, slowing down correlates strongly with ageing and diminished faculties.
I am old enough to know they aren't. That doesn't mean I don't like walking fast if situation allows, but thats part of my continuous training, injury recovery, or active rest.
I'm really not sure what that means.
In any case, you think what I posted is "peak HN", seemingly as a derogative comment. Then, you say I did it "in response to a claim that slowing down is associated with aging and diminished capacity", without noticing that said claim had been done in response to a person saying they intentionally slowed down.
Not due to diminished capacity. Not due to aging. With thoughtful intent.
Then asked why slowing down must be stigmatised, and GGP answered with this correlation, which clearly doesn't track in this case. Is that not a spurious correlation? And one that leads to preconceptions and stigma nonetheless.
Why does the fact that a all people slow down with age mean we must stigmatise slowing down?
What other conditions that correlate with old age must we stigmatise?
Physical movement can be joy. Dancing, running with children, playing sports with friends, and even just taking care of errands like cleaning so we can get on to enjoying our spaces with our friends and family are all benefits from being able to move and react faster. And I imagine any number of things will slow me down as I age, so I’ll take a +10% wherever I can get it!
> So why does walking speed even matter? It’s considered an important indicator of overall health. A hale and hearty speed signifies that your body’s systems—including your heart, lungs, muscles and nervous system—are working well together. “We call it the sixth vital sign”
If you're quicker you can do more. I didn't have time to read the rest of your comment.
I feel like even if I covered the same distance (or longer) walking quickly, it wouldn't be nearly as painful.
Yoga was very helpful--it taught me to use my muscles to carry my body rather than letting myself sink into my joints.
Because some of us have jobs to get to, trains to catch, appointments to make, airplane gates to queue at, and just generally need to get-things-done!
All for slowness, but not amongst pedestrians.
I am in two minds on that.
Firstly, they should be a little more aware if others around them.
Second, why are we rushing everywhere? Why can't we just take it slow?
I cannot reconcile that other than a middle path between them.
I assign _zero_ value to walking between the train and my house. When I get home I can play video games / make food / read a book / play music / whatever. Every minute spent commuting is a minute of enjoyment lost vOv
I see value, if you can call it that, in the off periods. That in having gaps, it make both the on and the off times better. Silence makes the music better. Hunger makes the food oh so much more enjoyable. That having the gaps is what makes it all so good.
Where as, chasing the hedonistic treadmill means you have to keep upping the engagement just to stay in place. To me, life is kind of like holding a wet bar of soap, you have to be gentle and nurse it, as if you try to hold on tight it will just slip out of your hands.
Because the trains and buses don’t run at 5 minute intervals, they run at 20+ min intervals, so missing one can mean a minimum of a 20+ minute delay, if you can fit onto the next one. That is the best case scenario if you do not have a connection to make, where delays can compound even further.
This is typical of people with ADHD. It also drives me up the wall :)
https://mypatientadvice.co.uk/knowledge-base/adhd/living-wit...
So we have to distinguish between walking slowly deliberately vs because one has trouble walking faster.
There will exist people moving quickly who have failed to plan, but a lot also incorporate moving quickly as part of their plan, simply because that's how they prefer doing things.
It's true that this kind of planning is vulnerable to unexpected problems - a missed connection, a queue, whatever it might be - but over time it can still work out rational if you accept this risk and just want to spend less of your time in aggregate in transit, with spells of over-provisioned waiting time, or just prefer the experience of moving quickly (there is much said about the benefits of slowing down, less said about the equally valid disposition of finding flow in the act of moving quickly, which many people also experience).
The exercise was 2 parts. First, you put away your mat slowly. Second, you put it away quickly.
I immediately thought, oh wow this is interesting. We've spent all day on slow stuff, but now the curriculum has varied to show us that speed can also work when required. I began to think there was more depth to the workshop than I originally thought.
But she ended the exercise as soon as we did the 2nd part, and she clearly didnt like the exercise.
I don't personally believe that everything is better done slowly. A lot is, but there's no reason to banish speed.
When I read at home, I fall asleep in 2 pages. I have to be moving around. I have a bunch of "flashcard" like stuff on my kindle related to coding, interview prep, etc. The only chance I have is doing this while walking.
That being said, some people don't like being too slow. I have a collegue who is clearly too slow for health reasons (overweight/unfit). When we are walking to lunch too fast for him, his excuse sounds a lot like what you said, while clearly out of his breath, because of a lack of stamina. So he frames it as a choice where we are wrong, while he is out of breath on a medium tempo walk after 100m. When I know from personal talks with him, that he dislikes being the slow one.
The human body is built to move. A lot more than most modern people move during their typical days. Not moving it, or moving it in ways that avoid effort has serious health effects. That doesn't mean we have to move fast always, but if your reason for not moving fast is an inability to do so, that is bad both for your body and for your mental capacity.
Moving slowly can be very exhausting. Try holding out you arm in front of you for a minute. So for many this isn't about moving slowly, it is about moving lazily.
Talking about responding too fast: Yes listening is a key skill many people fail to deploy. Yet effective communication sometimes works way differently than just listening to the words someone said. Here I have to think about another friend of mine. She talks very slowly and has the habbit of talking in circles. Meaning if you won't eventually interrupt her, you will hear variations of the same thought that has been expressed in the first 10 seconds spread out over minutes. This happens even with things where the first thing she said was a yes/no question you could answer in a second. A surprising amount of people will just talk until you interrupt them. In fact they want you to interrupt them, it stresses them out if you leave them hanging to fill more time. Those people would just have to get to the point, but they seem to have an inability to do so.
Effective communication after the sender/message/receiver model happens if the receiver can quickly decode the original thought encoded into the message (=words) by the sender. Old couples for example will not have to say many words in order for the other to understand what they feel and want to express. It is like they read each others mind, because communication isn't about reading the message and interpreting the words objectively, it is about decoding the thoughts, feelings and intentions encoded in the message made in the circumstances it was made.
That can lead to complications, if person A understands person B quickly, but person B doesn't trust person A to do so. Then person B needlessly insists on elaborating until the point is reached where sufficient information has been packed into the message to get the thought across. That means person B has a mental model of how person A may understand certain words that is way to pessimistic. For bad communicators that mental model is overly broad and unpersonalized ("throw words at the other side at some point they will understand"), while good communicators can quickly form and refine their understanding of how the other side receives messages. In the best case that works like with the old couple. In the worst case someone convinced themselves they can read minds, while all they do is guess and interrupt.
That means being interrupted can mean a person thinks they understood what you were saying. If this happens often and the person opposite gets it right, that is a sign they understand you well. If it happens often and the person opposite gets you wrong, either your thoughts feel more complex to you than they are or you need to work on the way you encode the thoughts into words (e.g. lead with the least obvious thought to avoid them hooking onto the first thing).
I always found it funny the speeches of Alan watts is just how slow he generally talked, and yet that didn't mean the message was slow.
I also find it funny that there are loads of AI copies of him and they are all racing through the script as they cannot grasp his slower cadence.
(from "younger next year")
> Key Points
> - Improvements in joint position sense can be attained via standard strength-training exercises.
> - Performing resistance exercises at consistent intensity rather than varying intensity resulted in better proprioception performance.
So just any activity will do, as long as you like it enough to do it regularly.
The rest is refinement.
Ordinary running doesn't do that, though there is a practice called "fartlek" (literally, speed-play) where you do random bursts of speed. It used to be considered excellent cross training, though I haven't heard the term in a while. (Perhaps because the name is unintentionally hilarious.)
But I'm the oldest one there, and I always cover the slowest person on the other team. I don't do collisions or jousts. I often just kind of hover behind the play on offense because I need to catch my breath.
Now, can I still do that at 80? Probably not. At 90? Almost certainly no. At some point, I'm going to have to hang it up. But today is not that day...
Systemic and muscular vitality is optimized when you get cardio, resistance, and bounding/dynamic movement. Heart, slow twitch, and fast twitch.
Strength training and controlled cardio is much better for continuous health.
When you start skating older you have to pad up, I combined that with a slackboard and just standing on one leg with my eyes closed.
I went from feeling like an old man to now when I am basically impossible to knock over, my nervous system can catch me before I even realize it, at 15mph, when one foot strikes a rock, walking is now no problem, and sometimes I even sit on the floor without any old man groaning when I stand up.
Also, tall box step ups (like 2ft), which is very tall, no back risk like weighted bar workouts.
You have to pad up and go easy, it's a multi year process to get enough low impact reps up to build joint health, when you're older injuries are a real setback.
Rollerblading is like bouldering for your legs and feet at speed, very fun, with an infinite progression curve that you can train at your own pace.
A walker might help as slowness is sometimes due to fear of falling.
My mother used a wheeled walker with hand brakes for several years before we switched her to the no-wheel kind.
> Not only does walking speed typically decrease with age, greater levels of hearing loss are linked with slower walking speed for adults of all ages.
Why is it every time there's a study posted to HN, someone feels the need to go in and say, "Have the researchers thought of $incredibly_obvious_thing?"
i have quite long legs and i outpace by a far cry everyone when i'm walking around the city without my earbuds or when i'm hiking
When I am with friends, I much prefer taking the time to listen to them, ask follow-up questions. Turns out this is the bare minimum, but it made me appreciate the conversations a lot more.
Talking with family is impossible because, the moment my words are not part of their thought process, they will interrupt me, or just pretend they're distracted.
He read more into the topic and figured that it is mostly a question of training. Since in my family many do sports, I have seen this many times: have an issue with some joint, back, whatever? Unless you broke a bone or have an open wound that typically means you need to find the right training to get over it.
Usually the worst is not moving at all.
Fair play for not using the word 'obligatory '.
Oxidative stress is my unrelenting hunch.
(Frankly, it is ridiculous to me that doctors go around saying that fixing your hearing will free up your brain will fix your life. Fix the thing that's dragging down an expensive system that's wired straight into the sensorium and yep, you'll fix your other expensive systems like the brain.)
> Not only does walking speed typically decrease with age, greater levels of hearing loss are linked with slower walking speed for adults of all ages.
Every body part wants in on this study.