By Lorraine Lawson

About This Session:

In this 20-minute session, Lorraine Lawson demonstrates a simple body scan to set your alignment. Explore with her how cadence (steps per minute) and stride adjustments help you stay relaxed and in flow, even on rough terrain. Learn how functional breathing can transform your walk into a restorative daily ritual.

You’ll leave with practical action steps and a free Rhythmic Walking Reset Journal, including the first two weeks of Lorraine’s book How to Run Easy, so you can start your own six-week walking reset straight away.

Foreign.
Good morning, everybody.
I am doing a video for you today for the summit, and I'm taking my dog for a walk up to the local
little creek.
So if you're coming outside, one of the good things to do is to appreciate where you are.
So I'm at my front gate and those are bananas.
The other thing is brilliant bright sunshine, which is lovely in the morning to get out for a walk.
Sunlight on your skin and in your eyes is a good thing.
I'm going to focus on posture, breathing and rhythm for our session today.
I may not get everything done in this one session, so I might have to snip some things together
later, but for the moment, just walk.
Go outside and walk.
It's cheap, it's healthy, you don't have to go very fast.
I'm not walking very fast at the moment.
I'm just sort of warming up.
Go with a friend, Go with your dog.
They always keen to go out and find a safe place.
For me, our area is really safe where I live, so we are actually heading across to the creek just over
there and have some nice good shoes.
Now, you'll see for me today, I'm standing in the middle of the road, so be careful.
It's not very the busy.
I'm barefoot.
All right, so I'll just get across here.
Now, what you want to do when you're walking is get your cadence at a regular beat.
I do have a cadence counter.
You can download one on your phone, you can use the one on your watch if you have a Garmin
running watch.
Or you can buy, literally, a little counter.
They sell them in music stores, right.
Because a metronome, I call it a cadence counter, but it's a metronome just does regular beaches.
So you need that for this reset that we're doing.
And I've just decided to come outside to show you how easy it is to get outside for a few minutes.
And the benefits of it if you are low on time.
Good boy. You can still get outside for 10 minutes in the morning.
Walking is very easy.
You don't really need any skills to do it and you need fancy gear.
So, like I said, I'm barefoot.
I'm just in a dress.
I don't even have running clothes or anything on.
And I'm taking my dog.
So just set yourself up for success.
And look at that beautiful sun.
Lovely.
The benefits of the walking, I've already mentioned most of those, but of course there is grounding,
which means me walking and touching the grass with my bare feet. Calms me down.
All right, so a nice way to start your day.
Cadence is the number of steps you take in a minute is you want to relearn locking a cadence in
your head rather than speed.
People just want to go faster, and by doing that, they take bigger steps.
That does not help you go fast.
It's very inefficient for the human body to take big, lumbering steps to try and get somewhere.
My name's Lorraine Lawson.
Haven't introduced myself just yet.
And I'm a teacher.
I teach online science and biology, but I'm also a beginner runner coach.
I coached hundreds of runners face to face over many, many years.
And this is why I offered to help out at the site.
The reset is not about starting up an exercise program.
It's about using walking to manipulate your nervous system.
And you're going to do that through breathing, posture, and the rhythm.
In terms of the posture, it's easier to do the alignment of the body when you're standing still and
follow through the procedure or the different steps.
Once you've done that, you then use that while you are out walking.
So the posture, you don't even have to go anywhere.
You literally just do it standing at your desk, working, or standing in the supermarket.
That's my favorite because in the supermarket, I'm always watching people in the line and to
discover how few people have good posture.
So good posture, you'll notice it straight away because the first thing is when you stand, your feet
are hip width apart and your toes are facing forward.
You're not doing that. That's the first thing you're focusing on.
Always.
Anytime I look down, my feet are always facing forward.
Women love to stand like this or like this.
It's like hanging on one leg.
Everything needs to be balanced for posture.
Here are a couple of tips.
Stand with your feet hip width apart.
Lift the arches of your feet.
So that's called screwing your feet into the ground.
You're not going to see this, but you're going to feel it because your knees are going to be
orientated outwards.
He does a bit of a stalk thing. Morning.
Good. I'm just on a video, but I'll edit it out and I haven't got you on it.
Only the dog for attack.
He always does his stuff. Dog.
And people go, is he gonna attack my dog? I go, no. He's so excited.
Oh, goodness.
Okay, that's enough. Come on. Good boy. Thanks.
So after you lift the arches of the feet and the knees go out, next thing is you squeeze the butt.
Now, the squeeze the butt is probably one of the golden rules for walking.
Think of having a $100 bill and that is squeezed between your butt.
You're going to lose that bill if you do not squeeze your butt.
So that's how I always imagine it.
And I'm holding that hundred bucks.
It's not going anywhere.
That squeezing off the butt, what it does is it tilts the pelvis just very slightly into the correct
alignment for where the body's most comfortable.
So that's very helpful.
The next thing you do is you drop your shoulders so you're nice and relaxed.
You lift your chin so your head is aligned on top of your shoulders and the rest of your body, right?
So the head, the head's really heavy.
You do not want it all over hanging down in front of the body. So.
So lift the chin.
I normally say to my runners, lift the chin. That's your cue.
But you're looking just above the horizon.
Once you've lift the chin, you're going to take a nice deep breath in, preferably through your nose
and then out.
That can be out of the mouth.
And then as you breathe out, you tighten your core like your muscles in your abdomen, and you
hold that nice and tight.
That position you've just put yourself in is a very safe place for the body.
You can now do anything with that position, and it reduces your risk of injury.
Now, cadence is how many steps you walk per minute.
I'm back at home because I only just did a quick little walk down to the creek, so I'm going to come
back to do cadence, and I'm going to tell you about the three types of functional breathing.
I'm going to do the body scan to give you a demo.
Always stand with your feet, toes facing forward, feet hip width apart.
Your weight is distributed evenly between the two feet.
Lift the arches of the feet so you're screwing your feet into the ground.
And as you do that, your knees will rotate slightly out.
You can't actually see any of this, but you can feel it squeeze the butt.
Now, that's going to tilt the pelvis, which is really important in terms of posture.
So tilt the pelvis by squeezing the butt.
Keep the butt squeezed all the time.
Next, drop the shoulders, lift the chin.
We'll take a nice deep breath in all the way into the belly.
So go in and breathe out.
And once you breathe out, you actually contract the belly and hold the core nice and tight.
You're ready to go.
I'm out for another walk.
It's afternoon and I'm following one of our canals.
It's been raining, so there's some water in the canal.
I can follow these canals for kilometers in my town.
Nice to be off the road, away from the noise on the grass.
Very healthy and good for the body to do something different other than be on concrete or bitumen
tar roads.
I wanted to tell you about my experience at Cape Roth Ultra.
It was a few years ago now.
I turned 50 and I shouted myself a gift to go and run this Ultra event.
And it was the first time that I actually grasped cadence.
I was watching the elite runners.
I would leave early and so they would catch up with me during the course of the event and pass
me.
And I was watching these guys and they were running on cadence without wavering the number of
steps they were taking.
Normally, runners aim for about 180 cadence.
As a walker, you might be heading out at a cadence of 80 to about 120.
And these runners, they came past me.
They came down this hill, over a creek, up the other side.
And their cadence did not waver the way that they stepped.
Regardless of what was under their feet, their beat stayed the same the whole way.
Unlike me, I was walking with some poles.
I was hoping not to slip in the creek.
I was struggling up the hills.
But to do cadence, well, you just do not waver from the beat.
And that's why you use the metronome to help you as you go.
For the waltz cadence demo, I set the metronome to 80.
And I counting every three steps.
You can see how I'm lifting my feet higher, but I still maintain the same cadence.
I'm taking the same number of steps.
And then there's another change of gears.
I call it change of gears.
There's another one there that it goes even higher.
We've done posture, we've done cadence.
Functional breathing is the last thing for today.
Belly breathing, breathe nice and deep into your belly.
Nasal breathing, breathe through your nose to get nitric oxide into your blood.
That dilates your blood vessels.
And then rhythmic breathing.
This guide will give you a couple of suggestions on the rhythmic breathing.
Options there are endless.
But this might help breathing out longer than what you breathe in.
Helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the one that calms you down.
So have a go at experimenting with all of these.
And to wrap up couple action steps for you.
Print out the journal that is the free giveaway.
And try to walk on different surfaces but maintaining your cadence using your cadence counter or
metronome.
Here's the free gift.
I'm going to include the first two chapters of my book here, how to Run Easy.
Because that covers the cadence, the breathing, and the rhythm, which is exactly what we have
done today.
Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope you had a good time.