Inspired by My 100-Year-Old Grandmother

TL;DR: Most people walk thousands of steps a day and get almost nothing from it. This article breaks down seven upgrades, from barefoot shoes to sandbag carries, that turn a basic walk into a strength, balance, brain, coordination, and bone-building practice. I call it the Walk Upgrade Stack. Some of these come directly from my 100-year-old grandmother. Some are modern tools. All of them are designed to help you move better, feel stronger, and get WAY more out of a walk than just steps.

My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. And I'm confident the way she walked had a lot to do with it.

She didn't wear fancy shoes. She didn't track steps. She definitely didn't track calories. But the way she moved through the world built strength, balance, and a body that held up for a century. Even in her 90s, she still walked every single day.

I remember walking with her as a kid. She was in her 70s and she was still quick. She'd hop a bit, even jog a bit, and I'd have to catch up to her. Then she'd slow down and walk normally like nothing happened. She moved like a kid. And her body reflected that.

Now compare that to most of us.

We're walking thousands of steps a day. We're still stiff. Still weak. Still winded climbing stairs. Thousands of steps and nothing to show for it.

So what did she do differently?

That's what this article is about. Seven ways to turn your daily walk into one of the most powerful movement practices you have. Some of these come directly from my grandmother. Some are modern tools inspired by her example. All of them are designed to help you become a stronger, more capable human.

These aren't seven separate tips though. They build on each other. Your feet feed your spine, your spine feeds your brain, your brain feeds your movement quality, and load ties it all together. Think of it as a stack.

Let's start with something my grandmother had that most of us have lost.

1. Free Your Feet (Rebuild Foot Intelligence)

She didn't walk in super cushioned shoes.

Try something real quick. If you can, take your shoes off right now and walk across the room. Feel that? Every bump, every texture, every shift in pressure? That's information your feet should be receiving every time you walk outside.

Most people think of feet as platforms. Two flat things you stand on.

But your foot is one of the most nerve-rich structures in your entire body. The sole of your foot has roughly 200,000 sensory receptors.

For context, that's more than your hand. Most people think these sensory receptors just detect pain.

They're doing way more than that. They're reading the ground underneath you.

How hard it is, how it slopes, where your weight is shifting, whether the surface just changed. Your foot is processing all of that before you even take your next step.

This information doesn't stay in your foot. It feeds directly into your balance system, your reflexes, and your movement planning. When your foot hits the ground, the sensory data travels up to the brain and helps your body decide, in real time, how to distribute force through the rest of the chain. How much to bend the knee. How to position the hip. How to stabilize the spine. Your foot is the first input in that entire decision-making process.

I call this Foot Intelligence. It's your foot's ability to feel the ground, respond to force, and communicate with the rest of your body about what's happening underneath you.

Here's what happens when you wrap that sensory system in a thick cushion for years. The receptors stop getting clear signals. The brain stops receiving accurate data about the ground. And when the brain doesn't trust the data coming from your feet, it compensates. Muscles up the chain start feeling a bit tighter, your range of motion gets a bit worse. Overall, you get stiffer because your nervous system is lacking information that would let you move fluidly.

Wearing cushioned shoes every day is like putting your foot in a cast. I know... seems like I'm exaggerating, but it really is. Your foot may feel protected, but underneath that protection, the muscles atrophy, the arches weaken, and the 33 joints in each foot stop doing their job.

That cushion that helps the ground feel softer, that assures you no longer feel the ground force? Well, the force still travels through your body. Foot, ankle, knee, hip, spine. That chain is always active. The difference is whether your foot is intelligently managing that force, or whether it's passing the problem upstream for your knee and back to deal with.

That's why people end up with knee pain and blame the knee. Back pain and blame the back. Nobody looks down at the feet first.

The research supports what you'd expect. A 2019 study by Miller et al. published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that walking in minimalist shoes for just eight weeks increased intrinsic foot muscle size and strength to a similar degree as doing targeted foot-strengthening exercises. The feet didn't need a special workout. They just needed to be allowed to work again. Once the cushion was removed and the ground provided real feedback, the muscles responded.

A 2016 study by de Oliveira et al. found that people who habitually walk barefoot have different foot-strike patterns, greater midfoot range of motion, and lower peak ground-reaction forces compared to people who always wear conventional shoes. Their feet had learned to interact with the ground more efficiently because they'd never stopped practicing. Instead of the cushioned shoe handling the force, their feet and whole kinetic chain built the intelligence to do so.

I didn't cover this in the video, but a 2024 study found that twelve weeks of barefoot walking improved EEG markers of cognitive concentration and reduced brain stress in adolescents. See the issue here? We think of the feet as just a structure we stand on, but it's more than that. Your feet send information to your brain that can affect how clearly you THINK. This even shocked me, but it makes sense. Foot Intelligence is about balance and managing the ground force, and it's ALSO a strong cognitive input.

I started my own barefoot shoe journey back in 2017. It took time to adapt, and I won't pretend the transition was easy. Your feet have been in a cast for years, so when you take the cast off, they're weak. My feet were feeling SORE because they hadn't handled so much force from the ground. I noticed that when my feet hit the ground, I had to learn to shift my body to handle the force better. In normal shoes I could just hit the ground without thinking, but not anymore.

Over time, everything changed. Now I can jump, sprint, jog, and run comfortably in minimalist shoes. They changed how I move, how I do Jiu Jitsu. My toes and feet are way more active, they're stronger, and the connection between my feet and the rest of my body has improved in ways I didn't expect. In grappling, your feet are constantly gripping, posting, and adjusting. Stronger feet mean better control on the mat. That's almost a decade of personal data at this point.

So my first suggestion: start taking some of your walks in minimalist footwear or sandals. Look for a wide toe box, flat sole, and enough space for your toes to spread. That's it. Give your foot room and let it feel the ground.

The transition takes patience. Don't throw out all your shoes tomorrow and go run five miles in sandals.

Keep some of your cushioned shoes, or get wide toe box alternatives that have a bit of cushion to give your feet rest when they need them. Vivo has boots, STAND shoes, and Altras are some of my favorite "break" shoes.

Start with short walks. Let your feet wake up gradually.

The muscles will rebuild. The arches will strengthen.

The sensory system will come back online. And once your Foot Intelligence returns, you'll start to notice changes not just in your feet, but in your knees, your hips, your balance, and even how clearly your body communicates with your brain.

But strong feet alone aren't enough. You can have the most alive feet in the world, and if the rest of your body moves like a fridge on wheels, it really doesn't matter.

2. Unlock Your Spine (The Spinal Engine)

You've noticed it, right? When some people walk, they look super stiff. Almost robotic. Like their upper body and lower body aren't talking to each other.

I'm no better. When I was purely focused on lifting weights, I walked the same way. Then you see an athlete or dancer walk and they look perfectly balanced. Gliding through space. The difference is obvious but most people can't explain what they're actually seeing.

When you walk, your body is supposed to rotate. Your shoulders turn one way while your hips turn the other.

Your spine twists slightly with every step, and that twist is doing something most people don't realize. It's storing and releasing elastic energy.

Think of it like wringing out a towel. You twist it one way, and when you let go, that stored tension snaps it back.

Your spine does something similar during walking. The rotation loads your connective tissue on one side, and as you step through, that stored energy releases and helps propel you forward.

It's free momentum. You're not muscling through each step.

Your body is recycling energy through rotation.

This is the concept that researcher Serge Gracovetsky called the "Spinal Engine." The idea is that your spine isn't just a support column. It's an engine that drives locomotion through rotation. Most people think walking is powered by the legs. Gracovetsky's work argues that the spine's rotational mechanics are a primary driver, and the legs are partly along for the ride.

My grandmother had this quality naturally. She didn't sit at a desk eight hours a day. She moved through the world, and her body reflected it. She never lost her rotation because she never stopped using it.

Most of us did.

We sit all day. We drive all day. We're told to keep our spine "neutral" during exercise, which is solid advice when you're under a heavy barbell, but terrible advice for how you should move through life. Shoot, even when bending down without weight, we're told YOU MUST KEEP A NEUTRAL SPINE. The nuance that the spine holds is lost in the name of NEUTRALITY!

Your spine has the ability to flex, extend, side bend, and rotate. When you stop asking it to do those things, it stops being able to do them proficiently.

The segments stiffen. The connective tissue loses its elasticity.

And your nervous system starts guarding those ranges of motion. If you haven't rotated fully in years, your brain treats that range as unfamiliar territory and tightens things up to protect you from going there.

You're not just losing mobility. Your own nervous system is actively taking it away because you stopped proving you could handle it.

And that free energy you were supposed to get from rotation? Gone.

Now every step costs more effort because your body is pushing through space like a block of wood instead of spiraling through it.

That's why some people look like they're fighting their own body when they walk. They ARE. The engine shut off and now it's all manual labor.

My friend David Weck, who's an expert in movement mechanics, teaches a concept called "Head Over Foot" that relates directly to this.

I explain the Head Over Foot concept in the video about my grandma. You'll get a much better visual there.

But in essence, keeping this principle in mind when moving through space will help you move with better balance. When your head stacks over your stance foot, your spine can rotate more freely and your body finds that gliding quality you see in athletes. My grandmother walked like this naturally. She didn't know it was a concept. It was just how she moved.

This is where rope flow changed things for me in a way I didn't expect.

Rope flow is a rotational movement practice. You're steering a rope using your spine, and in doing so, you're training your body to produce and control rotational force.

The underhand pattern mimics the walking pattern. The overhand pattern mimics the crawling pattern.

What the rope gave me was an input that nothing else provided. Not lifting, not stretching, not mobility drills.

The rope taught me how to FUNNEL rotational force through my body. How to initiate movement from my feet, hips, and spine and let it cascade outward into the rope.

That's a skill, and once you develop it, it transfers directly into how you walk, how you move, how you carry yourself.

I wish I could have shared this with my grandmother when she was alive. At least I get to share it with my mom. We walk together and do rope flow, and watching her move more fluidly because of it is one of my favorite things.

Now, have you heard about the flow state? Where you don't think about movement, you just move?

Rope flow is a practice that, when you build experience, puts you into a flow state. Most adults don't have a single practice that consistently gets them there.

They might hit flow during a sport or a creative session, but it's unpredictable. Rope flow is different.

The rhythmic, repetitive, progressively complex nature of it creates the conditions for flow almost every session. You're learning a skill, you're getting physical feedback from the rope, and at some point your thinking drops away and you're just moving.

That combination of skill development AND flow state access is rare in a single practice.

So, the second way to upgrade your walk? Take a damn rope with you. It's EXTREMELY light. Walk with it in both hands, one hand, or wrap it around your body and get rid of your hands entirely. (Examples of this are in the video below.)

Wrapping it behind you is a great technique, since your hands are out of the picture, you're FORCED to move through space while rotating your spine. The rope is basically coaching your body to do the thing it forgot how to do.

Over time, this improves your ability to walk with more fluidity, better balance, and a smoother ability to handle the impact from the ground. A walk that has some swag to it.

Your feet are awake. Your spine is moving. Now, how about your eyes and brain?

3. Juggle Walking (Train Your Brain While You Walk)

And you're probably thinking, "Did this man just say juggle walking?"

Yes. Stay with me.

Walking while juggling two or three balls forces your brain and body to coordinate multiple systems at once. Your eyes track the balls. Your hands coordinate timing. You're paying attention to your environment so you don't bump into anything. Your feet stabilize each step. And your nervous system starts figuring out how to manage all of this without you white-knuckling every movement.

Yes, this is developing coordination, but there's more going on. Multiple systems are being integrated in movement, and the research on what this does to the brain is kinda wild.

A 2004 study by Draganski et al. published in Nature (one of the most respected scientific journals in the world) found that people who learned 3-ball juggling for about three months showed measurable increases in gray matter density in brain regions responsible for tracking moving objects.

Gray matter is where your brain does its processing. More density means more raw computing power in those areas.

And the changes showed up in as little as SEVEN days. Not months.

Days. Your brain starts physically restructuring itself almost immediately when you give it a new coordination challenge.

But it's not just the processing centers that change. A follow-up study from Oxford (Scholz et al.) found that juggling also changed the white matter in the brain. If gray matter is the processor, white matter is the wiring between them. Juggling didn't just grow certain brain regions. It made the connections between those regions more efficient. Your visual system talks to your motor system faster. Your hands coordinate with your eyes more cleanly. The whole network gets an upgrade.

A 2022 systematic review pulled together 11 studies and confirmed that juggling consistently drives both gray matter growth and improved white matter connectivity. And it found something I think is really important for anyone reading this: juggling produces stronger structural brain changes than simple aerobic exercise alone.

Going for a run is great for your brain. But adding a coordination challenge on top of movement, what researchers call a "dual-task" activity, takes the neuroplastic benefit to another level.

Your brain doesn't just get healthier. It gets better organized.

But, there's no free lunch when it comes to developing skills. Those brain changes are temporary if you stop practicing. The gray matter that grew? It partially reverses when juggling stops. This is actually great news for anyone who believes in movement microdosing. You don't need a dedicated 30-minute juggling session. A few minutes on your walk, done consistently across your week, acts like a maintenance dose for your brain. You're keeping those neural pathways active and those connections strong, not through marathon sessions, but through regular small doses.

I remember the first time I tried juggle walking. Couldn't make it five steps. I'd throw the balls, fumble, stop, pick them up, and try again. I bent down probably thirty times every ten minutes. In my mind, I looked like a crazy person.

But something started to click. I stopped gripping so hard. My steps got smoother. And eventually I realized I wasn't just throwing with my hands anymore. I was throwing with the impact of the ground. Every step was feeding the next toss. My body had figured out how to link the walking and the juggling into one coordinated pattern without me consciously managing every piece.

That right there is what neuroplasticity looks like in real time. Your brain re-organizing itself to handle a complex task more efficiently.

Now this right here is a benefit that I didn't expect, but was glad it showed itself. You might not like this one though, most people don't.

Remember those thirty ball drops I mentioned? You can laugh about a grown man dropping his balls in public, but every single drop is a bend.

You're getting hundreds of back-bending repetitions on a walk without even trying. Most people haven't touched their toes since middle school PE.

Juggle walking fixes that by accident. Your spine is flexing, extending, and rotating throughout the whole practice, getting more movement variability in 20 minutes than most people get in a week.

I'd like to issue a challenge to you. When you pick up the dropped balls, ask yourself how many different ways you can bend to grab them. Maybe you bend at your back. Maybe you hip hinge. Maybe you squat, lunge, laterally lunge. Use these drops as ways to increase the amount of ways you can get low to the ground. Suddenly those "mistakes" become part of the practice.

Something shifts when you do this long enough. You stop thinking about juggling. You stop thinking about walking. You just move. That's the flow state showing up again. Same thing that happens with rope flow, but through a completely different input. Your brain has automated the pattern enough that conscious thought drops away and you're just... in it.

It takes practice before it clicks. You're going to feel ridiculous at first. I get it. But that's mostly in your head. Nobody out there is watching you as hard as you think they are. And honestly? The people who DO notice usually end up curious. I've had more strangers ask me about juggle walking than almost any other practice I do in public.

So now your feet are alive, your spine rotates, your brain is more engaged. But there's another thing my grandma did that I didn't appreciate until years later.

4. Flow Walking (Variable Intensity, Variable Movement)

I remember walking with my grandma as a kid. She moved like a kid herself. Sometimes she'd speed up out of nowhere and I'd have to catch up to her. Other times she'd randomly skip and hop, and I'd skip and hop with her. There was no plan to it. No protocol. She just moved the way her body wanted to move.

I didn't realize until decades later that she was doing something researchers would eventually study and put a name to.

Dr. Masuki and colleagues published findings in Mayo Clinic Proceedings (2019) after studying 679 participants with an average age of 65. They called it "interval walking training." The protocol was dead simple: walk normally for three minutes, then walk fast for three minutes. Repeat. That's it. After five months, the group saw a 14% increase in cardiorespiratory fitness and a 17% improvement across a range of lifestyle-related health markers like blood pressure, blood sugar, and body composition.

Those are big numbers for just walking faster sometimes.

But the finding that matters most is this: fast walking time per week was the variable that drove the results. Not total walking time. Not slow walking time. The intensity is what made the difference. You could walk for hours at an easy pace and not get the same benefit as someone who pushed hard for shorter bursts within their walk. Volume didn't win. Intensity did.

And that makes sense when you think about what intensity actually does to your body. When you walk at a comfortable pace, your cardiovascular system is barely challenged.

Your heart rate stays low. Your muscles are on autopilot.

Your body has no reason to adapt because nothing is demanding more from it. When you push into a faster pace, even for a few minutes, your heart rate climbs, your muscles recruit more fibers, your respiratory system has to work harder, and your body gets a signal: "This is harder than normal.

I should get better at this." That signal is what drives adaptation. Without it, walking is just transportation.

The beauty of variable intensity is that it meets you where you are. Feeling good today? Push those fast bursts harder. Feeling drained? Dial it back. Either way, you're getting more out of the walk than if you just cruised at the same pace the whole time. My grandma didn't need a heart rate monitor to figure this out. She just sped up when she felt like it.

But I'm not going to call this interval walking. I'm calling it Flow Walking.

Because my grandma wasn't doing intervals. She was flowing between movements. And that's the real upgrade here. It's not just about walking faster and slower. It's about adding movement variability to your walk. You can walk faster. You can skip. You can walk backwards and laterally. Sprint briefly. Juggle. Take a rope with you and stop for a few minutes of rope flow, then keep walking. You're moving like a kid again. You're microdosing different movement patterns throughout a single walk.

This is where the Movement Vocabulary concept connects. Every different movement you add to your walk is like adding a word to your body's vocabulary. Walking forward at one speed is one word. Add skipping, that's another word. Add lateral movement, backwards walking, a brief sprint, some juggling, some rope flow, and suddenly your body is speaking in full sentences instead of repeating the same word over and over for 45 minutes. I wrote more about this in the movement microdose article.

Movement variability does something that steady-state walking can't. It stimulates your cardiovascular system, your neurological system, and your musculoskeletal system more completely because each pattern asks something different from your body. Skipping loads your tendons differently than walking. Lateral movement challenges your hips in a way forward motion never does. Backwards walking changes which muscles are dominant. Every variation is a different stimulus, and your body adapts to all of them.

It also makes walking less boring. And boredom kills consistency. I can't stress this enough. The best movement practice is the one you actually DO. If your walks are monotonous, you'll eventually stop doing them. If they're playful and varied, you look forward to them. That's not a small thing. That's the difference between a practice that lasts years and one that dies in a month.

I mean, if you just want to walk and not do any of these things, I get it. Very grown up.

So at this point, your feet work, your spine moves, your brain is firing, and you're varying your pace and your movement. You're probably thinking: okay cool, none of this is going to make me STRONGER.

I see your point. Fair. Let's fix that.

5. The Bounce Vest (Learn to Move With Weight)

Sprinters and long jumpers have some of the densest bones on the planet. And it's not because they lift heavy.

A 2001 study by Heinonen et al. published in Bone compared Finnish triple jumpers to matched non-athletes. The jumpers had 18-41% higher trabecular bone density (that's the spongy bone on the inside), 31% higher bone mineral density at the femoral neck and spine, and their tibial cortical walls, the hard outer shell of the bone, were 20-50% thicker. Their bone strength index was 19-31% higher across the board.

Their bones weren't bigger. They were better built. Denser on the inside, thicker on the outside, and significantly harder to break. All from repeated impact with the ground.

See, bone responds to the TYPE of force you put through it, not just the amount. Static loading, like standing with a barbell on your back, absolutely builds bone.

But impact loading, where force hits quickly and repeatedly, drives a different kind of adaptation. The rate of loading matters.

How fast the force arrives tells the bone how urgently it needs to reinforce itself. Sprinters and jumpers are sending rapid, high-magnitude force through their skeleton thousands of times during training.

The bone responds by getting denser and structurally stronger in the exact areas taking the most impact.

In 2025, I made a deliberate effort to increase the impact on my bones. My bone density T-Score went from 7.2 to 7.7 within the year. During the Stronger Human bone building challenge, members of the community saw results too.

Watch my Bone Density video here:

So the question becomes: how do you start training that quality without being a track athlete? Most people can't just go sprint and do plyometrics on day one. Their bodies aren't prepared for it. And honestly, the biggest barrier isn't strength. It's knowing how to LAND.

This is where the Bounce Vest changed things for me.

The problem most people have with plyometrics isn't the jumping. It's receiving the force when they come back down. When many people land, they don't know how to organize their body to handle that impact efficiently. The force ends up concentrating in specific spots, the foot, the knee, the lower back, instead of traveling through the whole system. That's how people get hurt doing something that should make them stronger.

The Bounce Vest (technically called the ProPulse Power Vest) is about ten pounds with spring-loaded cartridges inside. Unlike a traditional weight vest that just sits on you like dead weight, this one captures energy on landing and returns it as you push off. When you land, the springs compress and absorb some of that force. When you push off, they release that energy back, giving you a small assist. Almost like having a mini trampoline built into your torso.

The springs give you audible feedback you can hear and physical feedback you can feel with every ground contact. That feedback teaches you something that's really hard to learn without it: how to find your plyometric rhythm.

When to absorb. When to redirect.

How to time your ground contact so force flows through your whole system instead of getting stuck in your joints. Athletes are able to jump HIGHER with the vest on than without because the feedback helps them organize their body more efficiently.

That blew my mind the first time I saw it.

I've found walking to be more fun with the Bounce Vest on. My gait becomes bouncier, and here's the part that seems backwards: it feels EASIER on my structure. Not harder. Rope flow taught me to walk well. The Bounce Vest improved on that by giving me feedback I could feel and hear with every step. It didn't change everything for me, but it was substantial in teaching me different ways of walking. I'll be walking and notice a rhythm that makes me want to hop or skip or change direction, and I just go with it.

No surprise I call it the Bounce Vest instead of its technical name. (David & Marty don't be mad lol.)

This is where the idea of Move With Weight starts. You're not just adding load to your body and suffering through it. You're learning to interact with force while moving through space. The Bounce Vest teaches your body to work WITH ground force rather than just absorbing it passively. That's a skill. And once you develop it, you carry it with you even when the vest comes off.

Most people notice it immediately. You put it on and your body naturally wants to bounce, jump, and move. Your walk develops some literal bounce to it. For many people, it's the first time plyometric movement has felt playful instead of punishing.

But what if you want to make your walk heavier? No spring, no bounce. Just dead weight pressing down on your structure. That's rucking. And it does something completely different to your body.

6. Rucking (Dead Weight, Deep Strength)

This one is simple. Grab a backpack, throw some weight in it, and walk. For a beginner, 10% of your body weight. That could be 15, 20 pounds. Eventually you can work up to 50 or more.

Rucking is a completely different stimulus than the Bounce Vest. There are no springs.

No energy return. No bounce.

Just dead weight pressing down on your structure with every step. And your body has to work harder because of it.

Your bones, especially around the feet, hips, and spine, get a loading stimulus that regular walking can't provide. Your heart rate climbs higher than a normal walk without you having to jog or run.

And you build the kind of slow, grinding endurance that lets you stay strong over long periods of time.

It's simple, it's effective, and you can do it anywhere. That's why rucking has blown up in recent years.

But there's research on weighted walking that genuinely surprised me. And it might change how you think about what your skeleton actually does.

A 2025 pilot study by DeLong et al. published in the International Journal of Obesity followed 18 older adults with obesity through a six-month weight loss program, then checked back at 24 months to see what happened. Both groups, one that just dieted and one that dieted while wearing a weighted vest daily, lost similar weight during the first six months. About 22-24 pounds each.

The difference showed up AFTER the diet ended.

The diet-only group regained all the weight they'd lost. Every pound. The weighted vest group? Only regained about half.

That alone is interesting. But the mechanism underneath it is what got me.

The diet-only group's resting metabolism dropped by over 230 calories per day during the weight loss phase. Let that sink in. Their body was burning 230 fewer calories per day just sitting still. That's your body slamming the brakes, sensing that weight is being lost and doing everything it can to hold onto what's left. This is why diets fail for so many people. You lose weight, your metabolism crashes, and your body fights you every step of the way to put it back on.

The vest group? Their resting metabolism barely moved. Only a 16-calorie drop. Basically nothing.

So WHY would wearing a vest prevent that metabolic crash?

This is where it gets fascinating. Your skeleton isn't just scaffolding that holds you upright. It's a sensory organ. Bone cells in your lower body, called osteocytes, extend tiny projections outward into the surrounding bone structure. These projections sense mechanical load. They feel how much weight is pressing down on the skeleton. And when they sense that load, they release molecules (separate from the hunger hormone leptin) that signal your brain about how much gravitational force you're carrying.

When you lose weight through dieting, those bone cells detect less load pressing down on them. Less load means fewer signals going to the brain. And the brain interprets that as a reason to slow things down. Metabolism drops. Appetite potentially increases. Your body is trying to get back to the weight it was sensing before.

The weighted vest essentially tricked the skeleton. The person lost 20 pounds of body fat, but the vest added external load that kept the total gravitational force on the bones roughly the same. So the osteocytes kept sending the "I'm still heavy, stay strong" signal. The brain never got the memo that weight was being lost, so it never slammed the brakes on metabolism.

I want to be clear, this is early research. Eighteen participants is a small study. But the fact that muscle loss alone can't explain a 200+ calorie per day difference in resting metabolism tells us something deeper is happening. And the gravitostat hypothesis gives us a framework for understanding what that might be.

It reframes weighted walking from "just conditioning" to something much more interesting: structural signaling. Your bones aren't passive. They're communicating with your brain about the loads you carry, and that communication influences your metabolism, your appetite, and potentially your body composition over time. That's a BIG idea.

Now, a word of caution. If you've just started wearing barefoot shoes and you add heavy rucking on top of that, you're walking barefoot with extra weight pressing down on feet that aren't ready for it. That's a recipe for stress fractures. Be smart about this. If your feet feel sore, walk with less weight, use the Bounce Vest instead, or wear shoes that are flat and wide but have a bit more cushion. Give your body time to adapt. There's no rush.

Rucking is a great slow strength stimulus. I enjoy it. You load heavier weight, walk slow, and your body gets stronger because of it. But it's a different experience than the Bounce Vest. The weight sits on you. It weighs you down rather than working with your ground contacts. Both are valuable. They just train different qualities.

But guess what, my grandmother had a version of loaded walking that makes both of these look easy.

7. Sandbag Carries and Head Loading (Compression Intelligence)

My grandmother would tell me stories about walking miles to get food and supplies from the village in Nigeria and carrying it all back home. Her, her mom, her siblings. Just carrying heavy loads for miles. Including on their heads. That was normal. That was life.

And the strongest people I've ever grappled with in Jiu Jitsu? Laborers. People who still carry things for a living. Not bodybuilders. Not powerlifters. People who move weight through space as part of their job. Their bodies are built differently, and you feel it the second you grab them. There's a structural strength that goes beyond what muscles alone can produce.

Nobody carries anything anymore. Everything gets delivered, wheeled, or shipped. We removed one of the most fundamental physical tasks humans have done for thousands of years, and then we wonder why our bodies feel fragile.

My last favorite way to upgrade a walk is filling a training sandbag with sand and walking with it. Mine is about 55 pounds, and I aim for a one to two mile carry a few times a week.

What I love about this is the number of ways you can hold it, and every position loads your body differently. I'm talking about compression. The weight pushes down on your structure, your bones, your skeleton, and your body has to learn to push back against it. That's a fundamentally different challenge than lifting a barbell off the floor and putting it back down.

When I put this bag on my shoulder, I can't just let it sink down and crush me. I have to push my shoulder up into the bag.

I'm actively lifting my body against the load. That's Skeletal Based Movement.

My bones and structure are doing the work, not just my muscles. Over time that gets tiring, so I switch to the other shoulder.

Zercher carry, single arm, gable grip, on the back. You're constantly shifting, and every position is a different movement puzzle your body has to solve. (You can see all of these carry positions in the video.)

This is what I mean by Move With Weight. You're organizing your body in a structurally strong way while MOVING through space.

That's a different skill than static squatting and deadlifting. In the gym, you load up, brace, lift, and put it down.

On a walk with a sandbag, you have to maintain that structural integrity while your body is in motion. Your hips are shifting, your spine is adjusting, your feet are managing uneven ground, and the weight is pressing down through all of it.

That's closer to how humans actually used load throughout history. We carried things from one place to another.

We didn't just pick them up and set them down in the same spot.

And head loading is the most efficient way to get weight from point A to point B. That's not my opinion. That's biomechanics.

Research on Nepalese porters (Bastien et al., 2016, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology) found that trained head-carriers achieve lower metabolic cost per kilogram carried than untrained people. Their gait becomes more pendulum-like, converting more motion into forward locomotion rather than wasting energy bouncing up and down.

Head-supported loads also reduce the oscillatory movements of the spine in all three planes, keeping it more vertical and stable. The body organizes itself around the load in a way that minimizes wasted movement.

My grandmother knew this without reading a study. She carried things on her head because that's what you did. And her body reflected decades of that practice.

Head loading has been one of the most potent stimuli for the strength of my neck in relation to the rest of my structure. You learn to position your body in a way that FIGHTS compressive force. Everything has to stack. Your ribcage over your hips, your spine long and neutral, your head pushing up into the weight. There's no faking it. If your alignment is off, you feel it immediately. The weight tells you.

In Jiu Jitsu, there are positions where your head posts against the ground or against an opponent while you maneuver your body around it. You're bearing weight through your skull and neck while the rest of your body moves. Head loading on a walk is an easier version of that same concept. Less chaotic, less variable, but the same fundamental skill: supporting load through your head and neck while your body moves underneath it.

A 2022 study did note that chronic heavy head-loading can increase the risk of neck pain and alter proprioception, so this isn't something to be reckless with. Start light. Ten percent of your body weight is a good starting point. If you have existing neck pain, skip head loading entirely until you've built a foundation of neck strength through other means.

If you ARE ready to try it, here are a few cues. (I demonstrate all of this in the video below, so watch that for the visual.)

Stack your structure: ribcage cleanly over the hips, spine neutral. Push your head into the weight, just like pushing your shoulder into the sandbag.

This removes slack from your structure and lowers the risk of compression injuries. Press your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

This lights up the deep neck muscles that stabilize your cervical spine, promotes nose breathing, and locks in head alignment. Think of it as bracing your core, but for your neck.

Rest your hand on the bag to keep it stable. As you tire out, the fatigue should show up in the middle of your back, not your neck.

If you're feeling it in your neck, lighten the load or stop.

And here's the thing that brings it all full circle.

In her 80s and 90s, my grandmother still walked around the house holding 5-pound dumbbells in each hand. Every day. I asked her why.

She said, "It makes me feel strong."

She was doing loaded walking before anyone thought to give it a name. And when she was a young girl in Nigeria, she was doing head loading because that's just how life worked.

The Bigger Picture

There's a lot of wisdom in how our ancestors moved. They didn't do loaded carries as exercise. They just carried things. Water, food, kids, tools. They didn't wear shoes designed to do the work for them. Their feet still felt the ground. They jumped, they skipped, they played. None of it was training. It was just life. And that life built bodies that most of ours can't compete with.

Modern convenience removed load, variability, and sensory input from our daily movement. Walking can bring it back.

You don't need all seven at once. Start with one. Free your feet. Add rotation. Add variation. Add load carefully. Build capacity slowly. Microdose it into your week and let your body adapt over time.

Because walking isn't just steps. It's bone loading. It's neurological integration. It's elastic training. It's metabolic signaling. It's structural alignment practice. It's Foundation.

And Foundation determines how long everything above it lasts.

Ke ntak odo, sosongo Eka Eka. Thank you, Grandma.

Frequently Asked Questions