Topic - Nordic Walking: survey of 100 clients

Date first posted on eCommunity - 29 April 2007

I'm a Nordic walking instructor and my tally of Nordic walking clients has recently reached one hundred. (This relates to people who have paid for classes and does not include free demonstrations - to clubs, etc.) I have marked the occasion by analysing the records, to see what patterns have emerged.

SEX OF CLIENTS
Of the 100 clients, fully 78 were female.
Of the 22 males, all but two were accompanied by spouse or partner. In many of these cases I had the suspicion that the men came because their spouse or partner had persuaded them to do so.

AGE OF CLIENTS
The following table shows the age-breakdown of the 100 clients.

The two under-twenties were teenagers for whom I ran a short ski-fitness course
based on Nordic walking. The four over-seventies included two women recovering from hip replacements and one (aged 84) who hoped that walking with poles would help her counter the onset of angina; these three naturally required individual instruction tailored to their needs. (The fourth over-seventy was an experienced cross-country skier, on a Ski Fit course.)

It can be seen that almost half the clients were in their fifties. And almost 90 per cent were forty or older. This may seem rather surprising, in view of the rather aspirational marketing imagery (fit young people leaping about) employed by the International Nordic Walking Association, but it reflects the pattern of actual take-up in other European countries, where Nordic walking has been longer established.

FITNESS LEVEL OF THE CLIENTS
On registration forms issued at the start of every course I asked for each client's height and weight and from this I have computed Body Mass Index scores. The following table shows the BMIs of the 70 clients who were prepared to declare their weight. In the remaining 30 cases the information was withheld! For these I have given my own subjective assessment of whether the client was "OK" or "TOO HEAVY".

Forty-three per cent of the 100 clients were overweight or obese at the time of registration. (We'll see below that the 100 clients include ten who were doing Ski Fit courses. Nine of the latter were judged "OK" while the other had a BMI of 25. If we disregard the Ski-Fit clients, and look only at the 90 Nordic walking clients, the percentage who were overweight or obese rises to 48 per cent, or just about half.)

BMI score is, admittedly, an unreliable proxy for fitness level, but it was clear from observation that the great majority of clients had poor fitness. Many were not taking any other regular exercise. Unfortunately I did not collect routine information on this, but it was clear just from talking to the clients that only a handful of them attended gyms (indeed there was an almost universal spontaneous declaration of distaste for the perceived drawbacks of gyms - noise, boredom, Lycra). Only about ten of the hundred were regular runners or joggers. However, country walking was popular, as were yoga and Pilates.

Nevertheless, in spite of the clients' lack of previous conditioning, we were able to achieve some fairly serious workouts.

TYPES OF COURSE
The clients did three main types of course:
- introductory one-off demonstration
- eight week course
- Ski-Fit course based on Nordic walking but also including static exercises for balance and muscle development.

The following table also shows the category "other short course". Into this I have put 13 clients. Of these, 7 were a group of friends who engaged me up for a special four-week course, while the other six were people who came back for a second introductory demonstration.

The most popular format was the eight-week course. Thirty clients undertook one such course. Twenty-five others signed up for more than one eight-week course: some did four or five! These eight-week courses comprised weekly sessions of about 90 minutes, plus warm-up and stretches. Session content varied from week to week and included:

- easy distance-walks (typically 6 kilometres)
- medium-paced walks interspersed with short or long intervals of slightly greater speed
- walks over hillier ground in which ladder-intervals were undertaken on the hills
- time-trial fast walks over a measured course, of 4 or 5 kilometres.

These programmes, it can be seen, were based on the kind of training used by endurance runners and race-walkers. They show that - as long as you match distances and intensities to the fitness level of the clients - Nordic walking can be used for serious, structured and very worthwhile exercise.
 

S Montgomery, for XCuk

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