Although the primary purpose of this Guide is to promote the planning, implementation, and evaluation of mall walking programs, a secondary purpose is to generate thinking about how to also leverage mall walking programs to best affect community health through walking. Below are some ideas that are meant to stimulate some program and practice ideas.
Some work sites offer employees comprehensive work site wellness programs. Such programs help employees adopt healthy behaviors, such as heathier eating, increasing physical activity, quitting smoking, and doing preventive health activities (e.g., obtaining blood pressure checks, flu shots, cancer screenings, or learning stress reduction techniques). Malls are work sites organized around numerous store retailers and their personnel. Mall walking programs can be a focal point for promoting wellness among mall employees more broadly than walking. Newsletters with health education tips, speakers presenting on a wide variety of health topics (e.g., nutrition, smoking cessation), health fairs, including those linked to blood pressure checks or obtaining flu shots, can all be activities promoted under the auspices of mall walking programs having a broader agenda than solely promoting and increasing walking. In summary, malls are work sites, and retailers and their employees can benefit from work site wellness activities that center around a mall walking program.
Mall walking will provide participants with the opportunity to obtain weekly aerobic physical activity. However, other physical activity programs could be integrated with the mall walking program. For example, the National Institute on Aging, Go4Life campaign (http://www.Go4life.nia.nih.gov), can help midlife and older adults improve their strength, balance, and flexibility, as well as increasing their aerobic activity. Strength, balance, and flexibility are important physical activity goals for older adults (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2008). Other group-based programs, for example, Walk with Ease (www.arthritis.org/wwe) and EnhanceFitness (http://www.projectenhance.org), may have the potential to be integrated into mall walking programs, if participants in these programs need to do additional walking to obtain their recommended amount of weekly activity.
