“A fish is not a monkey.”

Who would ever expect those six words written in that way to introduce a health and fitness column?

Recounting someone’s ordinary words does not require quotation marks, so in the eyes of a newspaper editor using them here is an error. The point made is an obvious one as well, so from a newspaper reader’s point of view starting an article that way also seems like a slip up.

But make no mistake about it. If you honestly apply those ordinary words to yourself, they become extraordinaire — and your workouts do too.

Unfortunately for me, honestly applying those words took a long time, so long that I can’t recall when I first heard them or who said them, which’s why the opening quotation lacks attribution.

But I can recall an email from a reader long-ago that, while mostly complimentary, criticized my ways-to-workout articles. He wrote that those ways were way too tough for him.

And I have no doubt that they were — or that he had disregarded a key piece to each of the articles. For in every one, there was something similar to what’s implied in the six words that start this one.

Why try to swing from tree to tree if you’re aquatic and limbless?

In other words, if you don’t recognize your abilities and limitations, it leads to workout frustration. I, for instance, can no longer do many of the workouts I wrote about 25 years ago and that frustrates me to no end — until I recall those six ordinary, yet extraordinaire words.

A fish is not a monkey.

Which is the basic thought behind the experiment published in the July 2007 issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings employing what the Japanese researchers who performed it called “high-intensity interval walking training” and is now better known via social media as Japanese walking. The experiment began with 246 adults between the ages of 56 and 69 randomly placed into three groups, one of which was a control group that did no walking.

A second group engaged in “moderate-intensity continuous walking training.” That’s the pace you might keep for moderate exercise (about 50 percent of peak aerobic walking capacity, which is nearly the same as VO2 max), and they kept it, as per the experiment, for at least 8000 or more steps a day for four or more days a week.

Considering artificial intelligence estimates the minimum amount of time needed to do so is five hours and 20 minutes and that you should also be weight training twice a week, that may be more of a time commitment than you are willing to make. Regardless, the time commitment’s important to note because some participants in the third group spent as little as two hours a week walking.

But the type of walking they did alternated the intensity level.

They first walked for three minutes at 40 percent of peak aerobic walking capacity and then three minutes at 70 percent of peak aerobic walking capacity (a rate that accelerates your breathing to the point where you need to catch it in order to finish a sentence) for at least 30 minutes and at least four days a week.

Five months later, the researchers redid the baseline tests on the 139 participants who remained in the study to the end. Those in the alternating-intensity group had lowered their resting systolic blood pressure more so than the continuous-but-moderate-intensity group.

The alternating-intensity group also increased their peak capacity for walking by 9 percent, a “significantly greater” increase when compared to the other one — even though the other group spent significantly more time walking. Moreover, when compared to their baseline strength tests for isometric knee flexion and knee extension, the alternating-intensity group had improved on average by 17 percent and 13 percent.

Now here’s a bit of trivia about the 2007 study that Kevin McGuinness, a physical therapist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC., shares in a Verywell Health article by Fran Kritz about the benefits of Japanese walking that makes starting this article with the “a fish is not a monkey” saying so apropos. The researchers only used three-minute intervals because the older participants became tired beyond that point.

Which leads McGuinness to say, “There is probably nothing magic about the three-minute intervals” as well as “it would be perfectly reasonable to start with three minutes of normal walking followed by one minute of brisk walking and increasing the length of the brisk walking interval as your fitness improves.”

Likewise, it’s perfectly reasonable for you to decide never to experiment with Japanese walking — as long as you do some sort of exercise frequently enough and intensely enough that it triggers positive metabolism in you. And to aid in that endeavor, it’s helpful to remember those six seemingly ordinary words.

“A fish is not a monkey.”