Great at scientific strides have been made in recent years to show convincingly that walking is among the simplest and most effective ways for anyone at any age to improve mood, boost physical health, curb chronic pain, and help prevent disease every step of the way.
The well-established bar for achieving these benefits is pretty reasonable: a walk in the park, literally, or around the block a few times. Whatever it takes to achieve the recommended 150 minutes or more per week — five days at 30 minutes each — of moderately intense physical activity, typical defined as somewhere between “conversation is easy” and “you can hear your breathing but you’re not out of breath.”
Got no time for that? Turns out the faster you hoof it, the greater the benefit, the latest evidence indicates. Put another way, you can spend less time walking yet enjoy the same health gains.
Fast track to heart health
A new study reveals the power of picking up your pace for heart health. Researchers followed 25,000 women, ages 50 to 79, using self-reporting to determine how much they walked and how briskly. About 1,500 of the women suffered heart failure during the 17 years of the study. The findings:
- Women who walk at an average pace, about two to three mph, are 27% less likely to have heart failure than those who walk slower.
- Women who keep a fast pace — defined as greater than three mph — have a 34% lower risk of heart failure than the slowpokes.
- Fast walking for less than one hour per week offers the same risk reduction as walking at average speed for more than two hours.
How fast is fast? Shuffling along at three mph means you’ll walk a mile in 20 minutes. Any of several phone apps will measure walking time and distance and calculate your pace.
“Given that limited time for exercise is frequently given as a barrier to regular physical activity, walking faster but for less time might provide similar health benefits as the recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate physical activity,” says study leader Charles Eaton, MD, a Brown University epidemiologist and a practicing family physician.
The effect should apply generally to men, too, Eaton tells me.
The results, detailed January 20 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, show correlation but cannot prove cause-and-effect.
However, the conclusions mirror many other studies that find any sort of physical activity that gets your blood flowing helps protect against heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, anxiety, depression, and dementia, and that greater duration or intensity offer added benefits.
Ultimately, walking faster rather than slogging along can add years to your life, a 2019 study found. Researchers in the U.K. examined data on 470,000 people across seven years, estimating that brisk walkers had dramatically longer life expectancies, up to 14 years for women and 20 years for men.
Walking also makes bones strong and contributes to better strength and balanceand greater mobility as we saunter into our later years. Walking can even relieve chronic pain through the release of feel-good, pain-killing chemicals. People with arthritic pain in the hip, knee, ankle, or foot who got just an hour of brisk walking per week — less than 10 minutes a day — on average became more mobile after four years, compared to those who walked less, a quarter of whom by then struggled with basic morning routines and could no longer walk fast enough to cross the street safely.
All steps count
Another new study, published in the February issue of the journal Diabetes Care, shows that putting one foot in front of the other is good for you no matter where or how you do it.
Accelerometers monitored the activity of 4,800 women 65 and older for a week to establish a baseline of steps they take, then researchers tracked their health for up to seven years. Every 1,000 steps a woman took per day during the test period was linked to a 6% lower risk of getting type 2 diabetes, explains Alexis Garduno, a doctoral student in epidemiology at the University of California, San Diego. And yes, Garduno says, 2,000 steps correlates to a 12% lower risk.
The study found neither a floor nor a ceiling to this equation, says Garduno’s colleague, John Bellettiere, PhD, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the university.
“No matter what level an individual is currently stepping, or how long they are currently walking each day, by increasing that, it was associated with reduced risk for diabetes,” Bellettiere explains in an email.
All steps matter, the scientists emphasize, even just moving about the home or walking the aisles at the grocery store. They also note that intensity is relative to your age and fitness level.
“When we talk about moderate to vigorous intensity steps, we are talking about the kind of steps that cause you to breathe a little heavy and make it harder to engage in a conversation,” Bellettiere says. “For the average person aged 70 to 80 years old, just walking around the block one time is moderate to vigorous intensity activity.”
The upshot of all this research: You don’t need to achieve 10,000 steps a day for good health. But you should get moving today, no matter how old you are, and the faster the better. And you shouldn’t worry too much about all these numbers.
“People who are inactive have the most to gain from becoming active,” Bellettiere says. “Focus on just being active. Do not measure changes and physical appearance, or changes in physical functioning, instead build the habit of being active by tracking how many times you go out intentionally to be active. Doing so will help build an active lifestyle, which has the sticking power to yield salutatory benefits throughout the adult age spectrum.”
