Walking gets dismissed because it is free, it requires no kit, and nobody can sell you very much of it. That is the only reason it is underrated. For a man over 50 restarting from a standstill, it is close to the perfect exercise.

What walking is genuinely good at

• It is the one thing you will still do on a bad week. That matters more than how many calories it burns, because consistency beats intensity every time over a year.
• It does not need recovery. You can walk on the day after a strength session, and it will usually make you feel better rather than worse.
• It is kind to knees and hips compared with running, which is what most men over 50 reach for first and quit within a month with a sore something.
• It works on your head. Anyone who has walked off a bad mood knows this, and a man who feels better makes better decisions at ten at night.

What walking is not good at

Being honest about this saves you six wasted months. Walking alone will not rebuild the muscle you have lost since 40, and muscle is the thing that protects your independence and keeps your daily calorie burn up.

Plenty of men walk ten thousand steps a day for a year, are fitter and happier for it, and still have the same waist and the same difficulty getting off the floor. Walking is the foundation. It is not the whole building. You need two strength sessions a week alongside it.

Forget ten thousand steps

The ten thousand figure came out of a marketing campaign for a Japanese pedometer in the 1960s, not out of research. It has stuck because it is a round number, and it puts off a great many men who currently do three thousand and conclude they are hopeless.

The useful research on older adults is far more encouraging: most of the health benefit arrives well before ten thousand, and the biggest single jump is from doing very little to doing a moderate amount. Going from three thousand to six thousand is worth more to you than going from eight to eleven.

The after-dinner walk

If you only take one thing from this, take this one. Ten to fifteen minutes on your feet after your main meal is the highest value walking you will do all day, and it is the easiest to keep because the trigger is already built into your evening.

It helps your body handle the meal you have just eaten, it breaks the sit-down-until-bed pattern that most of us drift into, and it takes less time than the adverts in one episode of anything.

Making it count a bit more

Once the habit is there, these turn a walk from pleasant into genuinely useful.

• Add hills. The same twenty minutes up a slope is a different piece of work entirely.
• Add a bag. A rucksack with a few kilos in it is a carry, which is one of the six movement patterns worth training, and you are doing it for free.
• Add pace in bursts. Walk briskly between two lampposts, stroll to the next one, repeat. No special name required.
• Walk to something. The shop, the post box, the pub. Walking as transport survives bad weather and bad moods far better than walking as exercise.

The part most men get wrong

Buying the shoes, the app and the route before doing the walking. The gear is not the barrier and never was. The barrier is that it is easier to sit down, and the way past that is to make the walk so small and so attached to something you already do that skipping it takes more effort than doing it.

What to do this week

• Check your current daily average on your phone. Do not judge it, just write it down.
• Walk after your evening meal, ten minutes, five nights out of seven. Same time, same route, no thinking required.
• Add one deliberate hill at the weekend.
• Do not buy anything. If you are still walking in a month, then consider the shoes.

Alex Jordan · Over 50 and Healthy