Is walking exercise or not? Dr Gabriel Lyon recently sparked a debate on this topic on social media. But does it even matter? Join me on today's Quick Wits, as I share my thoughts on why this question might be missing the point entirely and why strength training should be your top priority for physique development anyway. Welcome to the Wits and Weights podcast. I'm your host, philip Pape, and this twice-a-week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self-mastery by getting stronger, optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition. We'll uncover science-backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset, with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry, so you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in. Welcome to another Quick Wits, your go-to source for no-nonsense insights on optimizing everything.

Today we're tackling a recent controversy that was sparked by Dr Gabriel Lyon, and really it wasn't her fault. A clip of her was posted from an interview that she was in, where she was asked whether walking was exercise. She said no. But there is a lot of context around it and I'm not going to get into the context, but I'm also not going to make the mistake of taking it out of context by addressing her saying it's not exercise directly. I'm going to address the topic in general. So, yes, it made waves. There was a claim that walking is not exercise and, as someone who's always preaching the importance of strength training for building muscle and transforming your body, I do want to weigh in on this and offer my perspective. And the first thing is you know, let's just, let's just put it out there If your primary goal is to build a strong muscular physique, then walking alone isn't going to cut it and honestly, I think that's what Dr Gabriel Lyon was getting at and that's totally true. It's true that walking is actually under the category of NEAT, which in its definition is non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, and it does contribute to your overall daily expenditure, but it's not the most efficient or effective way to quote unquote exercise if your main form of exercise, or training as we like to call it, is building muscle mass via strength training, and for that, of course, you have to have training a certain number of days in your week, you have to be progressively challenging your muscles with weights or other forms of resistance, and this is what triggers the muscle building process and gets your body to adapt and grow stronger over time. What we talk about all the time and I know Dr Gabriel Lyon is all on board with building muscle.

Now, the other side of this is, you know, walking isn't useless, of course. It's, in fact, far from useless. It's one of the best things we can do. It's great for your overall health, for your cardiovascular fitness, even your mental well-being all things that we've talked about on this show and it can be a valuable tool for increasing your step count, which is a proxy for your overall movement, for getting your butt off the couch or off the chair and just moving around, and, of course, for boosting your metabolic rate, which supports fat loss and does it in a way that doesn't recover or doesn't interfere with recovery from your lifting. Now, if you're serious about transforming your physique, if you're trying to build as much muscle as possible, again, strength training has to be the priority, which means lifting weights consistently, focusing on compound lifts, targeting multiple muscle groups, progressively increasing the sets reps, sets of reps man, I am off today the sets reps and weight over time.

But let's go back to the original question. Does it matter whether we classify walking as exercise or not? All right, in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion probably not, because what matters is you are taking a comprehensive approach to your health, to your fitness, to your physique all of the things that prioritizes resistance training for muscle growth and incorporates walking and other forms of low intensity or even medium to high intensity movement and cardio for overall health and well-being. It's not about being mutually exclusive, choosing one or the other or getting semantic about our labels, but rather finding the right balance or the right harmony and making sure you're covering all the bases. So keep lifting, keep challenging yourself. Also keep walking, because they all have benefits. Just don't expect any one of these things to be the magic bullet, because they all come together to increase your energy flux and to be an everyday type of lifter.

At the end of the day, the real things that matter are not that walking is exercise or not. It's staying focused on your goals, trusting the process and making sure the process is working for you and it's enjoyable. And just keep putting in the work, keep showing up and whether you call it exercise or not and I prefer calling our deliberate, progress-based training, training and exercise is pretty much everything else and maybe, yes, walking, why not? It doesn't really matter. You know every step you take, every rep you perform, is just getting you one step closer to the version of yourself you're trying to be and that you know you can be, that you know you are and you're just aspiring and building into that self-identity.

So go ahead, lace up the sneakers, throw on the walking sandals, do it barefoot, whatever floats your boat, you know. Chalk up your hands in the gym, go lift some weights, all the things, and go claim that physique that you deserve. Until next time again, keep lifting, keep walking, keep striving for greatness one day at a time, and thank you again for tuning in to another episode of Wits and Weights to share this episode with them. And make sure to hit the follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then, stay strong.