Walking is in fashion again. Photo / Getty Images
Walking has always been good for us but it always felt as if there was something better to do, until now.
Walking has long had a coolness problem. It was something you only did because you didn’t have a car or were too old for “real” exercise. But signs are that this is starting to change, and one of the clearest signs is the strange and rapid emergence of the “hot girl walk”, which since it was conceived in 2021, has transitioned from TikTok trend to youth cultural reference point, to the point where it is now a fully fledged part of the public consciousness, referenced on reality television and even in respected media outlets, including Time, CNN and CBS.
Is it possible that the hot girl walk is evidence that we are witnessing the coolification of walking? Is the trend the spur walking needed to burst out from under the suffocating blanket of suffering required of us by other forms of exercise, including but not limited to running, weight training, crossfit, spin, HIIT, F45 and ludicrously early boot camps? Is walking set to become the hot new trend in moving our bodies for good?
The benefits of walking are obvious: Walking is gentle and kind. Nobody yells at you to do it faster or harder, to max it to the extreme etc., at least not if you’re doing it right. It’s low impact and it’s physically, mentally and emotionally sustainable in a way being brutalised by a hard-driving bootcamp instructor isn’t. Perhaps most important in these times of growing division, it is the most social of exercises. In a world that seems intent on doing increasingly bonkers things to itself in the name of self-improvement, walking seems like an oasis of rationality and calm.
The hot girl walk was started in 2021, by American TikTok user Mia Lind, who described it as a walk of 4 miles (6.4km), while listening to a podcast or inspirational playlist and focusing on only three things: gratitude, your goals and how hot you are.
On one of her many hot girl walk-focused TikToks, Lind says: “I started the hot girl walk because I felt like the fitness community was so exclusive, and I created the three pillars behind it which are gratitude, goals and confidence, because there was such a large stigma behind walking not being seen as a valid form of exercise.
“I wanted to make sure the walk wasn’t about walking a certain amount of miles every day but that you were actually taking the time to focus on yourself.”
One of her early explainer videos does show before and after photos displaying differences in the way she looks, but Lind says the hot girl walk is “different from every other fitness trend on social media because it’s not about looking a certain way”.
In many of her posts, Lind emphasises the wellbeing aspects of the hot girl walk, particularly its impact on mental health and happiness.
“I purposely made gratitude the first pillar of the hot girl walk,” she says, “because it’s scientifically proven that gratitude leads to happiness. Once you start counting those gratitude pieces, everything else in your world starts feeling really small.”
She has included paid promotions in her videos for companies including social media fitness app Strava and shoemaker Keen, but she says the hot girl walk is actually a good way of stepping off the hedonic treadmill. “When we’re thinking about the things in life we can be grateful for,” she says, “very rarely are you thinking about that new pair of shoes you bought.”
Another TikTok user, Kate Glavan, has invented the Fugly Hag Stroll, which is a sort of antidote to the Hot Girl Walk. She told Bustle last year that she appreciated the Hot Girl Walk if it was something people were doing for health, but she believed it had turned into a way of showing off one’s personal wealth and consumer habits.
As she told Bustle last year, “I was like, “You know what? I never look hot when I’m on a walk, I look so fugly, I look like a hag.” And I remember thinking, “F*ck this Hot Girl Walk.” At the time of writing, the Fugly Hag Stroll has accumulated nearly 100 million views on TikTok.
The hot girl walk industry might be on the rise, but it has been dwarfed by the 10,000 steps a day industry, despite the fact the latter is based not on science but on an idea a marketing person had for selling pedometers in the 1960s.
Where the hot girl walk is superior is that it is A) not prescriptive and B) not about achieving some arbitrary goal in which you either succeed or fail. In other words, the hot girl walk is about the process, not the outcome. Thanks in part to the explosion of the mindfulness industry, society is shifting from a focus on doing things for results (making us smarter, prettier, more employable etc), to a place where we savour the moments of our life, knowing they’re all we’ve got. It’s much easier to savour life when you’re on a walk in nature, nurturing your sense of gratitude and thinking about how hot you are than when you’re on a desperate walk around your neighbourhood at 9pm because you’re still 2500 steps short of your daily 10,000, which, just to reiterate, is an arbitrary number made up by marketers.
Having said that, both options sound vastly superior to carrying a tractor tyre around a converted factory while people yell at you to go faster. Wellbeing is relative.
Nevertheless, whichever way you choose to approach it, the evidence in support of walking is extensive. The landmark 1997 study Walking to Health, by Morris and Hardman found it helped to reduce or treat a huge amount of possible health issues – heart attacks, hypertension, musculoskeletal disorders, respiratory disease – and to reduce death rates.
The study also found that it strengthens the muscles of the legs, limb-girdle and lower trunk, improves flexibility, posture, carriage and weight control, encourages metabolism of high-density lipoproteins and insulin/glucose dynamics and increases bone strength.
And the benefits don’t just stop at the physical. In 2012, a systematic review of eight separate studies into walking found it had a “statistically significant, large effect on the symptoms of depression.” Other studies have shown it serves to reduce stress and to improve thinking and creativity.
It’s also good for us at a population level, lowering the strain on our health system and – to the extent that we walk instead of driving – reducing our dependence on cars, which in turn lowers our chance of injury or death in car accidents and reduces pollution, which in turn produces more positive health impacts.
The social effects of walking are also powerful, according to Vivienne Ivory, who specialises in social sciences, resilience and public health research for global consultancy firm WSP: “There’s some really good things coming out about how walking side by side is a good way to support people who are going through cancer recovery or other medical recovery states. And walking side by side with our children and our teenagers, or people who are struggling mentally, is less confrontational, less full on, than a face to face interaction.”
So walking is spectacularly good for us, physically and mentally, personally and societally, doesn’t require pain for its many gains and can be done while socialising with friends, or incorporated into some other task you would have been doing anyway. The fact it hasn’t been seen as cool may be one reason it hasn’t been more popular among the cool kids, but even if it had been, the fact is our cities have by and large not been conducive to it.
In good news, that’s starting to change. Ivory says there’s been a much greater awareness in recent years of the importance of walking, and policy changes show councils and other decision-makers are taking notice of it.
She says that “Blue-green infrastructure”, which emphasises bringing natural green belts and water sources into urban design, is becoming increasingly prevalent, and by creating an environment that makes people feel good, it’s more likely to get them out of their cars and houses in order to go walking.
Although Mia Lind coined the term “hot girl walk” in January 2021, it wasn’t until the middle of last year that it really took off, with a massive spike in interest around May and another around October, according to Google Trends. Its use is much diminished now to what it was at its peak last year (although still way up on 2021) but just because people aren’t using it as much doesn’t mean it’s no longer having an impact. As Lind says of the hot girl walk itself, it’s not over when you arrive home after completing your four miles: “You take that energy and you carry it with you throughout the whole day.”
May her big hot girl walk energy stay with us forever.
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