90s Nostalgia Guided Walk | 15-Minute Walking Workout | 73

This 15-minute walking workout is a fun trip back to the 90s. Set to upbeat background walking music with some audio coaching, we’ll laugh about music, movies, TV, gadgets, and all those little things we completely forgot about while you get your steps in. 

You can do this guided walking workout outside, or at home on a treadmill or walking pad.

Need a break from emails, chores, and all the grown-up stuff for a little while? With this walk you'll get:

• A fun way to make the walk fly by
• About 2,000 steps with a brisk walking workout that doesn’t feel like exercise
• A beginner-friendly, low-impact walk
• A chance to clear your head and reduce stress
• A little 90s nostalgia while hanging out with a friend

And because I tend to drift, I…

• Admit I used to disconnect my husband’s dial-up internet just by picking up the phone
• Wonder why Blockbuster never seemed to have the movie we wanted
• Risk making half of you mad by admitting I thought Titanic was just… okay
• Wonder how we ever found anything before GPS (and yes… MapQuest is somehow still around)

This walking podcast includes background music, walking cues, and a bell at the halfway point if you’re walking outside.

If you grew up in the 90s, or just want a way to make walking less boring, lace up your shoes and come for a walk. We'll dive into the world of Clueless, The Matrix, Nirvana, Backstreet Boys and more! 

Don’t forget to Follow.

Transcript

0:00

This is a little bit of a different walk. It's a nostalgia walk. It's a 90s memory lane walk. You can do this walk outside or inside on a treadmill or walking pad. Start out at an easy warm-up pace. I'm still going to cue you on the walk, but we're also going to kind of lose ourselves and try to make time fly. There'll be a bell at the halfway point. It's going to be a gradual build. Follow the beat. So when I was newly married in the 90s, sometimes when I wanted my husband to come to bed, I would pick up the bedroom extension and disconnect him from that dial-up session. Remember when we could just do that boop, hang up, and the connection was broken. The internet was new and it was so fascinating. Do you remember that horrible dial-up screeching? You know, getting online sounded like a robot being murdered and it took forever. And then someone like me would pick up the phone and the connection broke. Photos loaded one line at a time. And "You've Got Mail" was so exciting. Not like now when I have 50,000 unread emails in my Gmail. And somewhere in that era, I was teaching step aerobics in my cousin-in-law's garage. To some of the best music of the 90s. Pick up the pace a little. It's a comfortable, steady walk. Shoulders are loose. Arms are swinging naturally. So do you remember going to Blockbuster on a Friday night? It was a ritual and we'd walk the aisles forever. Trying to get there before every copy of that good movie was gone. All the new releases were rented. We'd find an empty case and go up to the front desk and ask if someone had returned it. And then I never got my movies in on time so I always had to pay late fees. Be kind, rewind was our slogan. And I don't know if you remember the VHS drama with the VCR would eat the tape. We'd record over something important or we'd set the timer wrong and record two hours of nothing. I think programming in my microwave now is hard but I can't even remember how I would program that VCR. And the movies were just, they were so different and so fun and just some of the biggest hits ever. Titanic. Everyone saw that one. And some people saw it five times. I felt it was kind of meh. I know, don't hate me. Like, why is he giving her the door and not saving himself? He barely knows her. Save yourself, dude. Or Jurassic Park and the dinosaurs looked so real. It was scary but it was awesome. I'd watch it through my fingers. And Clueless. Alicia Silverstone was so perfect in that. My favorite quote is, "Daddy, some people lost all their belongings. Don't you think that included athletic equipment?" Pick up a little bit of pace now. It's briskus. That's not even a word. Brisk-ish. Like you're trying to get to Blockbuster before every copy of the good movie is gone. Of course, we can't forget The Matrix. Remember those special effects were so cool? They wore those black coats. I don't know if they were bending time or slow motion where they would do that weird thing and the bullets would fly over them really slowly. Made everyone wonder if we were living in a simulation like The Matrix. And sometimes I still feel that way. And scream. You know, scary but funny. Hold on to your steady pace. It's brisk enough to feel like a real walk. And back then we had appointment TV, which means you watched it when it aired. There was no streaming no pausing it and no binging an entire series. There was no i'll watch it later unless you taped it which we went through that how hard that that was if you missed it you waited for a rerun Some of the biggest shows Friends, Seinfeld, ER, X Files, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Fresh Prince... they had actual cliffhangers and there were so many episodes each season unlike what like eight to ten for Apple. We had commercial breaks so we could do dishes or do some chores in between and then we'd all talk about the episodes the next day there was no spoiler warnings because everybody was supposed to have watched it and if you didn't watch it well then you found out what happened. Music in the 90s was really awesome and so diverse. Remember we would tape songs off the radio and we'd sit there with your finger on record and pause and then waiting for the song you wanted to come on, and then the DJ woud talk over the intro when the song finally did play, or he would cut off the end, and we'd be so mad because that was our one shot at getting that song. We made mixtapes and back then you know the song order mattered, we'd write the track list by hand and trying to make it look and then we'd like to make it look cooler than it was. And this is before iPods, before playlists and before everything was just there at our fingertips. Walk a little faster now. Add some pep to your step. It's like your favorite song finally came on the radio Yes and even before iPods I had a Walkman. And then we had a little cassette adapter that we put in the car. Then we had to use a pencil to rewind the tape. And then, oh my god, Columbia House. Twelve CDs for a penny, or whatever ridiculous deal they were offering. Maybe it was ten cents by then. I don't remember. And then suddenly you owed them your first born. They would never stop collecting from you. Remember that? We'd forget to send back that no thanks card. Get that mystery CD that you never wanted. But that's how all our big CD collections happened anyway. A bunch of stuff we never wanted. Stay with that pace. Follow the beat. Immerse yourself in the 90s. Then after the Walkman was the Discman. That was a portable CD player. Felt like it skipped if stomped too hard when we walked. Remember we had those CD binders in the car? Our whole music library was zipped into that one gigantic case that was so easy to steal. But we had to take it with us everywhere. And back then MTV actually played music videos. And they had shows like TRL, Making the Video, Unplugged. And VH1 had my favorite show, which was Pop-Up Video. The little bubbles with random facts that pop up all over them. T had shows like Behind the Music, the rise and fall and comeback of every single band that we used to love. Stay with that pace. Let those arms help you. Let the music move you. And 90s music was all over the place. We had Nirvana and Pearl Jam on one side. Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys on the other. Sir Mix-a-Lot. TLC. Alanis. No Doubt. Whitney. Mariah. Janet. Liz Fair. And of course, Madonna reinventing herself all over again. And again. And again. And somehow all that music belonged to the same decade. Stay with that pace. Keep those shoulders down away from your ears. So much variety. Because I like big butts and I cannot lie. And I like good songs and I cannot lie. I wasn't a big Nirvana and Pearl Jam fan back then. Or Spice Girls. Now if you drifted slower with your pace, gently pick it back up. You're going to walk to the beat. Roll through your feet. Most of the 90s I think was like riding around in our car with our one big giant CD binder next to a physical map or a Thomas Guide. Because before GPS, getting anywhere was so much harder than it is now. Like my internal GPS now is broken because I rely on my phone so much. But back then I knew where north, south, east, west was. And we had paper maps that were impossible to refold. We just roughly fold them like a fitted sheet and throw them into our glove boxes. And Thomas guides. I had a Thomas guide for every Southern California county I drove often. I felt so cool. I felt so grown up. Well, we'd stop at a gas station and they'd say, go until you see that big tree. And then eventually we graduated to MapQuest printouts. And that was so cool. Did you know that MapQuest still exists? They're on social media. They have a really funny social media account. But they also still exist as a website. It felt so advanced because we'd print the actual pages with the exact directions and we'd highlight the turns. And then if we weren't paying attention, we'd drop those pages between our seats. We'd have to pull over, figure out where we were. We'd miss turns and we'd be sweating. We never exactly knew where we were going back then, but somehow we made it. Stay with that pace, nice and strong. Feel the 90s. I don't know if you had a pager, but I had a pager because I had my own business and I felt so high tech. We would get paged and we'd go find a pay phone and then we'd have to know if something was important or if someone was being overly dramatic. You know, 911 page was like actual panic. I need you to call me back right now. Everything seemed to have a code back then. And technology was just so complicated. And it was such a little baby technology. Stay with that pace. We're still moving strong. We had floppy disks and that's where that little square thing in the save icon came from. And even before that, back in the 80s, I used an eight inch floppy disk. And it was actually floppy and had "do you not bend" on it. I was always running out of space. I thought fax machines were the most amazing invention ever. The paper would feed slowly through and then it would come out on the other side. And then we'd dial the wrong number like we dial someone's phone number, but it was their fax machine and we'd get that horrible noise And the experience of writing checks at a grocery store. If you've never done that, those were the days when the person ahead of you pulled a checkbook and you would just roll your eyes because he knew it was going to be a while. We would balance our checkbooks and write in those little registers. And I could never read my handwriting. Like, is that $5. 68? Or is it, you know,$568? Let's not forget smoking sections. They still had them. And they're in restaurants and airplanes. I don't understand smoking sections in airplanes, especially with just a little curtain. You're trapped for like nine hours up in the air with just a little curtain separating you from the smoke. Slow it down just a little bit. We're still walking. Not a cool down. Disposable cameras. Remember those? We took 24 photos. Maybe seven of them were good, but we couldn't see. Our thumb was in the frame. Terminator 2, Linda Hamilton's arms. She was so buff. O. J. Trial was everywhere. And the Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan scandal, which nowadays probably wouldn't even be much of a scandal. The Hugh Grant scandal. And the Princess Diana media frenzy. An insane amount of things happened in the 90s. I got married. I had two kids. The 90s full of hope and future, but also super, super, super inconvenient. Everything was so much harder. We were on that cusp of new tech, new way of life. We remember it because we still had to touch real things. We held the map. We made the tape pushing those buttons. We walked through Blockbuster, which I kind of miss. We call the pager. Okay, the main part of the walk is done. If you want to hop off now, you can. If you want a short cool down, stay with me. We're going to slow our pace a little bit to an easy walking pace. Take a deep breath in through your nose. And exhale through your mouth. Roll those shoulders back. Big rolls. And roll those shoulders forward. Big rolls. Relax your hands. Shake them out a little bit. Relax your face. Open up your mouth just a little bit to relax your jaw. Keep your shoulders down, away from your ears. And when you're done with this walk, see if you have a few minutes just to do a quick stretch. At least your calves. And I'll see you next time.