When you walk backwards, you reach back with your toe and roll through your foot to your heel. This works the anterior tibialis (shin) muscle, as opposed to the gastrocnemius (calf) muscle, which tends to do all the work when you walk forward, says Marr.
One of the benefits of walking backwards is that it can help strengthen your mind and coordination. "Doing something like challenging the body to walk backwards requires actually quite a lot of coordination, quite a lot of effort, and it's asking your brain to do something it's not as used to doing," McNamara said.
Backward walking can improve mobility in your knees, hip, and ankle—plus, it can prevent pain and shock absorption in comparison to regular walking. In some cases, physical therapists use reverse walking to improve gait after an injury, surgery, or illness (1).
Moving in reverse gets your heart pumping faster than moving forwards, meaning you get a cardio fix, metabolism boost and torch more calories in a shorter period of time. Walking backwards is brilliant for balance.
While walking normally (forward motion) is something that we do everyday without any conscious thought, walking backward can help you improve your leg endurance and aerobic capacity more rapidly. That's because the challenge you are placing on your body is greater.
Benefits of Walking Backwards. Walking backward on a treadmill offers several benefits. These include improved range of motion in your knee, quadriceps strength, hamstring flexibility, and mobility.
While that's yet to be scientifically proven, "mostly because our gait pattern changes when we walk backward (as opposed to forward), it is difficult to say with 100% certainty that, yes, indeed, 100 steps backward is equivalent to 1,000 steps forward.
By improving the ability to walk backwards, it may be possible to improve foot functions, increase mobility function, improve balance ability, and reduce the fear of falling and the incidence of falling. In addition, this training is easy to learn and popular, and has the advantage of being low cost.
A study shows that moving in reverse may help with short-term memory. Lost your car keys? Instead of retracing your steps, you might want to try walking backward to jog your memory.
In a recent study it was found that among participants those who walked backward experienced much more strength gains and less back pain. The reason for this being that the spinal muscles are activated more when walking backwards.
Many studies have concluded that BW can improve the symptoms of patients with knee osteoarthritis (KOA) and can be used for rehabilitation and adjunctive treatment of KOA, but there is a lack of evidence-based medical evidence.
Ankles are very unable when they are in plantarflexion, so with the practice of backwards walking it can help to strengthen the ankle joints and also balance of the whole body to try and prevent sprains in the future.
Therefore, the application of walking backwards down on a steep slope in patients with plantar fasciitis was confirmed to be helpful in terms of pain relief.
Backwards walking helps lengthen the hip flexor muscles, which can decrease tightness. You reach back with your toe and roll to your heel when you walk backwards. This allows you to work the shin muscles instead of the calf muscle, which gets worked in forward walking.
This study found no overall effects of exercise on backward walking in people with dementia. Promising subgroup effects were indicated in participants who walked unaided.
#1: Walking Backwards Utilizes Muscles Differently
While this may sound like a relatively useless finding, it has potential therapeutic benefits for physical therapy and rehab settings. Isometric contractions of the quads can improve knee extensor strength more safely and effectively than eccentric contractions.
Walking backwards is a gross motor milestone that is typically seen around 1.5 to 2 years of age. It's a challenging task that takes time to develop confidence as it's not a standard movement pattern that children are used to and are more commonly seen at first when trying to maintain balance.
Generally, older adults in good physical shape walk somewhere between 2,000 and 9,000 steps daily. This translates into walking distances of 1 and 4-1/2 miles respectively. Increasing the walking distance by roughly a mile will produce health benefits.
Walking backwards can improve forward gait (how a person walks) and balance for healthy adults and those with knee osteoarthritis. Walking backwards causes us to take shorter, more frequent steps, leading to improved muscular endurance for the muscles of the lower legs while reducing the burden on our joints.
Adults aged 65 and older need: At least 150 minutes a week (for example, 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week) of moderate intensity activity such as brisk walking. Or they need 75 minutes a week of vigorous-intensity activity such as hiking, jogging, or running.
The relation between walking and calorie burn
While some may burn around 300-400 calories in 10,000 steps, some may burn way less. The factors that matter in this case are your body weight, height, fitness level, pace and the area you are walking in.
“Running or jogging two and a half miles is equivalent to walking 10,000 steps,” says Chauncey Graham, CSCS, an ACE Fitness Professional at Gold's Gym in Washington, DC. Higher-intensity workouts also come with added benefits, including improvements to your cardiorespiratory system.
Walking backward on the treadmill (or even running backward, if you can) offers many benefits. Not only will you tone different muscles, but it also helps improve your balance. It even boosts your heart rate,1 making it a good interval workout variation.
High-impact sports or activities – Like running and plyometrics, any exercise involving high impact on the feet can cause aggravated plantar fasciitis pain. Constant pounding of the grass or pavement, like in football or soccer can cause inflammation of the plantar fascia.