Before hygge, lagom and cold plunges took over the wellness world, Finns were quietly perfecting something far simpler: walking with poles. Nordic walking started as off-season training for cross-country skiers, and it's now positioned as the next big export from a region that has turned everyday wellbeing into an art form.

The origins are surprisingly specific. Competitive skiers were using poles with running shoes for summer training as far back as the 1930s, but it was Finnish PE teacher Leena Jääskeläinen who introduced the idea to the general public in 1966 — the first documented use of ski poles outside competitive sport. The modern boom came decades later, when Aki Karihtala and his team at Exel, then the world's largest cross-country ski pole manufacturer, coined the term and launched the first purpose-built Nordic Walker poles in 1997. A year later, over 500,000 Finns — a tenth of the country's population at the time — had given it a go.

Today the International Nordic Walking Federation, founded in 2000, counts practitioners in more than 40 countries, from the Nordics and Baltics to Croatia, Japan and Australia. The appeal is easy to see: the technique engages the whole body while the poles take pressure off your knees, making it genuinely low-impact. It's cheap, sociable, and needs nothing more than a trail and a pair of ergonomically designed poles. The INWA even teaches a structured 10-step method so beginners learn the technique safely.

What makes Nordic trends travel so well, argues the writer behind this piece — who literally wrote the bestseller on lagom — is the foundation beneath them: sustainable, egalitarian societies with free right-to-roam access to nature, as in Sweden's Allemansrätten. The trends aren't quick fixes but long-term habits anyone can keep up, from athletes to grandparents.

Finnish trend expert Katja Presnal is a recent convert. After two decades of chasing trends, she bought a 100-year-old former dairy in the Finnish countryside, surrounded by lakes and walking trails, and turned daily life into what she calls a 365-day retreat — the kind of slow, nature-based wellness her family used to travel to Tuscany to find. Nordic walking, for her, is the accessible entry point: physically and financially low-threshold, and a natural way to meet people.

For travellers, this is a wellness trend you don't need a spa resort to join. World Nordic Walking Day happens every May, and more than 13 national associations run group walks with certified instructors. Or you can just grab poles, pick a local trail and walk at your own pace — INWA publishes themed walk ideas and charity challenges for inspiration. If you're heading to Finland, joining a group walk through its forests and lake country is about as authentic as Nordic wellness gets, and it costs next to nothing. Sometimes the next big thing in wellbeing has been hiding in plain sight for sixty years — one footstep and one pole plant at a time.

Story via Condé Nast Traveler.