When you talk about the best physical exercise, what do you think? Yoga? Skipping? In this era, we should have a healthy and balanced lifestyle. More and more food and beverage products are sold freely everywhere. Most of these foods have a content that is still unclear, but most teenagers still ignore it. To maintain a balance between consuming unhealthy foods or those that are not good for the body, teenagers should do physical exercise every day at least a light warm-up or walk to do a daily routine. Nowadays, sports are increasingly underestimated by teenagers. They often think of exercise as a boring or unimportant activity. Even though exercise has many benefits that can increase everyone’s resistance. Teenagers can start to cultivate this from the simplest thing which is walking.
Walking is one of the physical activities that can function as endurance and strength and is one of the simplest aerobic exercises that we can do daily (Wahyuningsih, 2015). This activity can be done anywhere and anytime. We can go to any nearby place by walking. However, the average teenager today tends to be lazy to walk. For example in our school, students often choose to using elevator facilities instead of climbing the stairs, even though the activity is to go downstairs. This proves that there is still a lack of awareness for the simplest exercise, which is by walking.
After conducting a survey on our friends regarding the habit of walking, it turns out that not a few of them have not been able to get used to using the stairs facilities. Actually, when we use the stairs, it is an opportunity for us to do small exercise. Then, 81,8% of respondents admitted that they prefer use personal transportation to travel somewhere then walking, even going to a place that has a distance of 1 kilometer, only 9,1% of respondents that always do it, the rest rarely or never. This shows that the habit of walking has not been too cultured among teenagers. Sometimes teenagers think it’s trivial, it turns out that just by walking someone already gets a lot of benefits.
When someone does a physical activity for at least 30 minutes every day, it can increase the endurance of the heart, lungs, and other body organs. According to the Kementerian Kesehatan Republik Indonesia (2019), Walking has several benefits for the body, especially at a young age like us today. First, by walking we can prevent heart disease as mentioned before. Between walking and running, both are equally effective in helping prevent heart disease by lowering blood pressure and cholesterol levels, as well as smoothing blood circulation. In addition, walking is an aerobic exercise that can make a person’s lung volume increase. Walking can also increase muscle strength. People who walk 10.000 steps every day are equivalent to training at a fitness center. In addition to strengthening the body’s resilience, by walking we can calm the mind, prevent us from quickly becoming forgetful, and improve mental health. Walking can also improve a person’s mood, so for readers whose emotions are unstable, walking can be an option to refresh our min
Walking has a lot of benefits or impacts for us and it helps to keep us from getting sick. Therefore, if we want to be a healthy generation in the future, let’s start cultivating walking in our daily activities! (Aisyah Ayuning Adina – XI-3)
