Most of us don't do enough of it and it's one of the safest forms of exercise. We really should be designing our cities and built environments to be more walkable so more people get in 30 minutes of brisk walking daily just from running errands without really trying to exercise per se.

People would be healthier. Pollution levels would be lower. Studies show that walkable, mixed use neighborhoods foster higher sales for local businesses and are thus typically more prosperous. "Eyes on the street" is a known antidote to crime and you get that primarily by having a pedestrian-friendly built environment.

And I don't believe walking has any track record of fostering heart attacks.

We have forgotten how to do that kind of thing, but that doesn't mean it cannot be done. There is a lot we can do to mitigate urban heat island effect and use design to make even our outdoor public spaces pedestrian-friendly in terms of local weather.

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00380121/document

I run r/UrbanForestry. It's brand new and we are likely to talk about passive solar design at the city level as part of what we do there. I already mentioned the thing I stated above about Middle Eastern cities. You are welcome to join us there.

Some terms that may be helpful in a search: Iranian vernacular architecture; desert vernacular architecture; passive solar.

It is something I hope to put more information together on, but one challenge is that I imagine a lot of primary source materials from that region of the world are not in English and I never learned any of the major languages of that area, like Farsi and Arabic.

I do occasionally speak with Middle Eastern planners and the like and ask them questions, but I haven't yet hit pay dirt in a big way. My recollection is that articles about Iranian architecture have generally been the most useful and promising so far. Iran was previously known as Persia and it is one of the older cultures on the planet and has a rich history.

Edit: I threw some more articles together here: https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanForestry/comments/jhmmuz/the_d...

Not everyone lives in the big city. Not everyone needs to. Even within the big city, there is lots of room for improvement.

And making it possible for more people to run some of their errands on foot doesn't mean "You aren't allowed to leave this 5 square kilometer area and can never drive or use public transit." It just means some of the things you do normally can be reached on foot (for a greater percentage of people than is true currently).

Running marathons and the like do not seem to promote health and can actually harm the body. And anecdotally, I've known a few folks that are obsessive long-distance runners and cyclists, and they physically look older than others in their age group.

I mean, the literal original Greek Marathon Runner who ran the 26 miles to warn of the war/invasion, according to lore, actually killed him upon his delivery of the message....

The idea that running is just shuffling along at a steady pace is a straw man, and looks nothing like what actual runners do!

And the current evidence is that your maximum exertion is what matters, not time spent exercising. So someone that does a few sprints, to max intensity, over 20 minutes actually will have better cardiovascular health than someone that runs or jogs for an hour or more.

If you’re sprinting at full exertion for a few minutes, you’re able to hit a much higher max than you would if you were running long distance.

This cannot be true, it contradicts literally all the best training knowledge for distance runners. NCAA cross country coaches and professional distance coaches have their runners doing high mileage easy days and intervals on hard days, and as someone who has experienced this training first hand, you absolutely cannot do the hard days at a proper intensity if you haven’t built up your aerobic capacity through a LOT of easy to medium effort long runs. If they could get all the cardiovascular benefits from HIT, they would only be doing that. The teams that win college championships and the pro teams sending athletes to the Olympics are the ones with the fittest runners, the fittest runners are the ones with the best training. They are doing the majority of their mileage in long easy efforts.

Anecdotally, myself and many teammates I’ve known have seen our biggest jumps in performance come from increasing weekly mileage (more easy miles) and while keeping the volume of hard efforts the same. Time spent exercising matters very much.

> HIIT (high-intensity interval training) and sprint interval training (SIT) for 6-8 wk increase VO2peak more than or at least comparable to MCT (moderate-intensity continuous training).

> The clinical and physiological benefits of HIIT compared with those of MCT are shown in Table Table1.1. In multiple RCTs, a wide range of targets, including skeletal muscles[19-22], risk factors[21], vasculature[19-22], respiration[22,23], autonomic function[24], cardiac function[20,22,25-27], exercise capacity[26], inflammation[27], quality of life[27], physiological markers such as VO2peak, and endothelial function, showed better improvements with HIIT than with MCT.

This is true even though the HIT groups were spending just minutes sprinting a few times a week, vs the MCT groups that spent 30 minutes to an hour running or jogging.

Put that alongside evidence that sustained exercise (how sustained I have no idea) has negative effects (as per above comments), and the argument seems plausible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_traini...

You might not call it Tabata training, or HIIT, but once a week you are probably doing 6x15second sprints, every other week will do something like 10x60 hill repeats (which others might call a sprint), and most weeks will be running some form of speedwork. This could be 8x800m/2 minutes, some form of pyramid (1min, 2min, 3min, 2min,1min, 2 sets), or some other combination. All of these though come down to going unsustainably hard for a short period and then having a recovery period. Is that not what HIIT is?

The same applies to many other sports where this simple caricature is applied. Most sports, done right, do involve high intensities, and recoveries.

Ultimately we strive for moderation, but ought not without consideration as to what it should entail.

Imagine, a Japanese (mostly fish+seaweed) diet + walking 30 miles a day, and how healthy that pop would be...

Also, there is supposedly a study showing 30 min of jogging 4 times a week halves a person's heart risk.