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Looking to revitalise your fitness routine? A straightforward yet impactful method could be to start walking backwards.
While a brisk forward walk offers myriad benefits – strengthening bones, building muscle, boosting cardiovascular health, and easing stress – its familiar rhythm can become monotonous. This is where retro walking, or reverse walking, presents a compelling alternative.
Beyond merely shifting perspective, this unconventional technique places distinct demands on the body. Janet Dufek, a biomechanist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has researched movement mechanics, from walking to jump landings, to prevent injuries and improve performance. A former college basketball player and dedicated exerciser, she has personally embraced backwards walking.
In humans, reverse locomotion can increase hamstring flexibility, strengthen underused muscles and challenge the mind as the body adjusts to a new movement and posture.
“I see a lot of people in my neighbourhood and they walk, and that’s good,” she said. “But they are still stressing the same elements of their structure over and over again. Walking backwards introduces an element of cross-training, a subtly different activity.”
On the treadmill
Kevin Patterson, a personal trainer in Nashville, Tennessee, recommends the treadmill as the safest place to retro walk. You can adjust it to a slow speed. However, Patterson likes to turn off the treadmill — termed the “dead mill” — and have clients propel the belt on their own.
“It can take a while to get the treadmill going, but from there we have them be the horsepower for the treadmill,” he said.
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Patterson said he uses backwards walking with all his clients as an “accessory exercise” — a weight-training term for add-on movements designed to work a specific muscle group — or during warm-ups. The activity typically makes up a small part of the workouts, he said.
“The treadmill is great for older clients because you have the handles on the side and you reduce that risk of falling,” he said.
Off the treadmill
Dufek suggests working a one-minute segment of backwards walking into a 10-minute walk and adding time and distance as you get comfortable.
You can also do it with a partner; face each other, perhaps clasp hands. One person walks backwards, and the other strolls forward and watches for problems. Then switch positions.
“At first, you start really, really slowly because there’s a balance of accommodation and there is brain retraining. You are learning a new skill,” Dufek said. “You’re using muscles in different ways.”
If you work your way up to running and get really good at it, you can try running a marathon backwards — 26.2 miles or 42.2 kilometres. Yes, people have done that.
Backwards walking as cross-training
Dufek classifies backwards walking as a form of cross-training, or incorporating a mix of moves into a fitness program. Doing a range of exercises can help prevent overuse injuries, which can occur after repeatedly using the same muscle groups.
For many people, cross-training involves different activities and types of exercise: for example, running one day, swimming the next, and strength training on a third day. But the modifications required to walk backwards work in the same way, but on a micro level.
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Do small tweaks make much of a difference? Once an avid runner, Dufek said she had several pairs of running shoes and did not wear the same pair two days in a row.
“The shoes had a different level of wear, a different design,” she said. “Just by changing that one element, in this case footwear, it would provide a slightly different stress to the system.”
Retro walking as rehabilitation
Physical therapists instruct some of their clients to reverse walk, which can be useful after knee injuries or for people in rehabilitation or recovering from surgery.
“Backwards walking is very different from forward walking from a force perspective, from a movement pattern perspective,” Dufek explained. Instead of landing heel first, “you strike the forefoot first, often quite gently, and often the heel does not contact the ground.”
“This reduces the range of motion in the knee joint, which allows for activity without stressing the (knee) joint,” Dufek said.
Backwards walking also stretches the hamstring muscles, the group of muscles at the back of the thigh. Dufek is interested in finding out if it improves balance and reduces fall risks in older adults by activating more senses of the body.
Athletes do it naturally
There is nothing unnatural about backwards walking. In fact, backwards running is a key skill for top athletes.
Basketball players do it. So do soccer players. American football players — particularly the defensive backs — do it continually.
“I played basketball and I probably spent 40 per cent of my time playing defence and running backwards,” Dufek said.
