Ministry Of Silly Walks

One thing I think is underrated is lifting your legs much higher when you're walking, and then varying the motion of your ankles/knees/hips with each step.

When you look at people walking, most of them are lifting their feet just barely off the ground. If you try lifting your feet up significantly higher, you'll notice two things:

1) it's much harder work than you think it would be – you can feel your breath go faster, so you're getting more exercise and burning more calories. This makes sense because you're significantly increasing the component of your motion that's going against gravity (vertically upwards) and therefore requires more force. (By comparison, moving forward is the easy bit)

2) you have way more options for how you move each of your joints, and can vary those choices with every step. (Despite the title of this piece, they don't have to be observably silly, you can just position and rotate your joints in slightly different ways).

The benefits of (1) are presumably self evident; the benefits of (2) I took from nutritious movement. The basic claim is that your joints etc would historically get a wide range of movement from walking barefoot on hilly ground (or whatever), such that walking gave you a varied diet of movements throughout the course of the day. As a modern person walking in shoes on flat asphalt, you get none of that natural variation, so to prevent your joints etc falling into "grooves" you need to generate more variation in your movement in tons of small ways.

My one note of caution is not to strike the ground too hard, you can definitely feel the difference that the additional height generates, although (frankly) this is presumably still less strain on your joints than jogging.