Episode 5
TL;DR
- The benefits of walking include improved cardiorespiratory health, reduced risk of heart disease, and many others.
- A study of runners and walkers concludes that the amount of energy expended is more important than the duration of exercise in achieving the benefits.
- The recommended speed for walking is 3 and 4.5 mph (or 4.8 and 7.2 km/h), which involves accelerating breathing and heart rate while allowing for conversation.
- To reap the benefits of walking, maintaining this pace for at least 30 min a day, 5 days a week is ideal, but shorter sessions spread throughout the day are also effective.
Do you really know how to reach your minimum daily physical activity targets? What if I told you that speed is almost more important than distance? Today, we’re going to look at the benefits of walking every day, as well as the recommended duration and pace. Ready?
The many benefits of walking
According to the American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics published in 20171, walking is the most popular exercise activity (30% of people who engaged in sports).
But why? Simple: walking is easy, enjoyable, requires no special equipment and is entirely free. What’s more, it offers a host of health benefits. To name a few:
- Improving cardiorespiratory fitness
- Reducing risk of heart disease and stroke
- Improving management of hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes
- Less joint pain
- Stronger bones and better balance
- Greater muscular strength and endurance
- Reducing body fat
- Even protecting against dementia and depression
And on a personal note – bringing back bad memories to my former colleagues who used to see me pacing the corridors – I’d add that walking helps me think better…
Seriously though, what aren’t we being told?
Actually, brisk walking
Paul Williams of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and Paul Thompson of Hartford Hospital in Connecticut think they’ve finally answered the question.
They studied2 participants in the National Runners’ and Walkers’ Health Study with 33,060 runners and 15,945 walkers. They measured their blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels at baseline, then followed them for 6 years to see who was diagnosed with high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol or diabetes.
The answer is what common sense would dictate: it’s the amount of exercise in terms of energy expended, not the time spent doing it, that counts. In other words, to enjoy the benefits mentioned above, it’s better to walk faster.
What’s “faster”? The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) define3 it as between 3 and 4.5 mph (or 4.8 and 7.2 km/h). And to talk to the runners among us, that’s a pace of 13 to 20 min per mile (or 8 to 12 min per km). And if that still doesn’t speak to you, it means walking fast enough that your breathing quickens, your heart rate increases and you start to sweat, while still being able to hold a conversation.
Ideally, you should maintain this pace for at least 30 min a day, 5 days a week4. If this seems too long, don’t worry: you can break it down into several shorter sessions throughout the day. In fact, one study5 showed that several smaller training sessions spread throughout the day are just as effective as one longer session.
A quick aside: for those of you who wondered, as I did when I was a kid, how you could tell the difference between racewalking6 and running in athletics. Walkers always have one foot on the ground, whereas runners are entirely in the air for part of each stride. In other words, walking is a low-impact activity, with a much lower risk of exercise-related injury than running (5% vs. 70%).
Remember that, to reap the benefits of walking, you need to quicken your stride, even if it means doing it in several steps. I may come back to the benefits of walking for your mental wellness…
Here’s a personal hack: walking isn’t necessarily an activity in itself. Like me, you can associate it with a moment of pleasure by walking your dog (quickly). Some people set themselves other constraints, such as getting off the subway a few stops earlier, parking further away or combining watching their favorite TV series with their workout. Along the same lines, there are even mini-bikes that you can place under your desk…
Fun Fact
It seems that the recommendation to walk 10,000 steps a day comes from an excellent advertising campaign by Japanese company Yamasa for its Manpo-kei pedometer (Man for “10,000”, po for “steps” and kei for “meter”). For context, it was just after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics…
Better still, the kanji for 10,000 looks like a man walking…
Going further
References
- https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/sports-and-exercise/home.htm ↩︎
- Williams PT, Thompson PD. Walking versus running for hypertension, cholesterol, and diabetes mellitus risk reduction. Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol. 2013;33(5):1085-1091. doi: 10.1161/ATVBAHA.112.300878. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23559628/ ↩︎
- https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/physical/pdf/pa_intensity_table_2_1.pdf ↩︎
- Bull FC, Al-Ansari SS, Biddle S, et al. World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. Br J Sports Med. 2020;54(24):1451-1462. doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2020-102955. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33239350/ ↩︎
- Murphy MH, Lahart I, Carlin A, Murtagh E. The Effects of Continuous Compared to Accumulated Exercise on Health: A Meta-Analytic Review. Sports Med. 2019;49(10):1585-1607. doi: 10.1007/s40279-019-01145-2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31267483/ ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racewalking ↩︎