Jetti Walking Poles: Joyce Shulman Gets You Walking
99 Walks That Will Change Your Life
Author and fitness entrepreneur Joyce Shulman has made getting people on their feet her mission. Shulman is the author of Walk Your Way to Better: 99 Walks That Will Change Your Life, a motivational book that promotes walking as a pathway to mental wellness and happiness. There’s also the added bonus of improved fitness, thus presenting walking not as a task, but as a way to reconnect the body and mind. Timing is everything, and as the pandemic set in, Shulman’s book provided people everywhere a blueprint of how to maximize a healthy activity for much more than just physical fitness.
“We started 99 Walks about five or six months before the pandemic,” says Shulman, “and not surprisingly, we saw tremendous growth during that time. What has totally heartened me is that walking is having a moment; I’m seeing that people developed a walking habit during the pandemic because it was all they had access to. Walking and push-ups in the living room. So many people discovered the benefits of walking for their mind and their mood, even beyond their body. People are holding on to that and continuing to maintain the walking practice. Some people have abandoned it, of course, but many more have held onto it, and since I believe truly, with every fiber of my being, that walking is a gateway to so much goodness, it just thrills me.”
“People Are Like Bananas”
The book brims with rational, relatable, and applicable thought topics to explore while walking. For instance, the chapter The Trouble with Oranges drives home an important point. Because it’s nearly impossible to do anything else while eating an orange, we sacrifice eating it because, in our hectic lives, we try to multitask as much as possible. Shulman suggests not giving up the pleasure of eating the orange for the sake of not being able to do something else simultaneously, and as importantly, to ask ourselves what other simple pleasures we are denying ourselves for the same reason. The chapter People Are Like Bananas, Shulman explains this way: “Have you ever noticed that if you put two bunches of bananas near each other, they’ll ripen at the same rate? Have you ever stopped to think about how weird that is? The reason is that bananas give off a chemical that causes all the bananas in the same bunch to ripen at about the same speed. In that way, people are like bananas. You are going to take on characteristics of the people you surround yourself with. And all that means is that you have to choose carefully.” Sage advice, indeed.
Jetti Fitness
Shulman, who is a former attorney now calling Sag Harbor home, saw a calling to a greater purpose in helping others, specifically women. “I have been working with women for the last 15 years,
and I noticed two things over and over. First, women tend to be lonely and disconnected, and second, many are not in the kind of physical shape that they want to be, nor that they should be. There’s a connection between the loneliness epidemic and our isolation and our feelings of compare and despair, along with trouble getting out the door to take care of ourselves. Those observations, combined with a personal, lifelong passion for walking, physical activity, and movement, led to the creation of first 99 Walks and then Jetti Fitness.
Jetti Fitness dovetails nicely with Shulman’s 99 Walks with its launch product, Jetti walking poles. For the uninitiated, walking poles boost the effectiveness of walking by engaging the upper body more fully. Shulman says, “Because I’m a New Yorker, I’m a bit of a type-A personality, and I want as much benefit as I can possibly get from my walk. We were exploring ways to bring in some elements of Nordic walking, to build up the intensity, and give it more of an American spin. We built Jetti Poles to increase the intensity of your walk, which I call the ‘Jetti paradox,’ because you feel like your body is not working as hard, when, in fact, you’re burning an average of 55.6% more calories and activating your whole upper body. You get strength-building and increased cardio from that, while at the same time, you’re providing a lot of stability. Jetti Poles are great for all ages. For people who are looking to get more movement, people who are looking to burn more calories, Millennials who want more intensity, older people who want a little bit more stability – they are suitable for everybody.”
Website: jettifit.com
