Tue, Jul-02-24, 01:38
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/152/160
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Progress: 110%
Location: UK
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What a daily walk really does to your body
It’s great for your wellbeing and mental health and, a study has found, can also improve back issues. The experts tell Peta Bee how to maximise its benefits
Walking boosts cardiovascular and joint health, reduces anxiety, improves focus and keeps stress at bay. Stacy Clemes, professor of active living and public health at Loughborough University, says it is among “the best things we can do to improve our overall wellbeing”, and that “researchers keep coming up with more sound scientific reasons” in favour of walking more often.
According to a new study in The Lancet, a good stroll has also been found to be a powerful antidote to lower-back pain — a condition that, according to NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), affects up to 60 per cent of the UK’s adult population at some point in their lives. More than two-thirds (69 per cent) of lower-back-pain sufferers, meanwhile, are likely to experience a recurrence of the issue within 12 months of initial recovery, according to statistics published in the Journal of Physiotherapy.
For the Lancet’s study, a team from the spinal pain research group at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, recruited 701 adults, all of whom had recently recovered from an episode of lower-back pain. Half were asked to follow a tailored programme based on their fitness levels, with a target of walking 30 minutes a day for five days a week by six months. The other half did no extra exercise. Both groups were tracked for one to three years.
Mark Hancock, a professor of physiotherapy at Macquarie and lead author of the paper, says the results of the walking programme were significant. “The walking intervention group had fewer occurrences of activity limiting pain compared with the control group. And the walking group had a longer average period before they had a recurrence [of lower-back pain], with a median of 208 days compared with 112 days.”
Sam Bhide, an NHS physiotherapist and spokesperson for the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, isn’t surprised at these results. “We know that back pain has many causes and that physical activity is one of the ways we can improve it and keep it at bay,” she says. “Walking is one of the best ways to keep back and body in shape.”
But how else can walking improve your health?
How short can you make your walk?
You only need to set aside about ten minutes for a daily walk that makes a difference. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, reporting last year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that 11 minutes a day of brisk walking is enough to lower the risk of heart disease, a stroke and even some forms of cancer.
Meanwhile, Tom Yates a professor of physical activity at the University of Leicester, found that for people with conditions such as asthma, ten minutes of brisk walking could increase their life expectancy by as much as three years. “Even doing shorter bouts of one or two minutes of brisk walking throughout the day can be beneficial to health,” Clemes says. “But if you can manage 10-12 minutes, that’s better still.”
Your stride makes a difference
Changing the pace of your walk or adding in some hilly terrain can ramp up the intensity, but a new study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggests there is another way to get more of a workout from your daily steps. Adam Grimmitt, a researcher in the university’s department of kinesiology, found that simply chopping and changing the length of your stride can burn more calories.
Grimmitt first asked a group of participants to walk on a treadmill for five minutes with their usual gait while he measured their average stride length. In a repeat test, he then asked the same group to walk with strides that were either five per cent longer or shorter than usual, directed by lights on the treadmill that informed them where to place their feet.
It’s not just the mental focus entailed that makes walking with uneven strides more challenging — Grimmitt claims it also requires greater muscular effort. His published results showed that for every 1 per cent change in step length, there was a 0.7 per cent increase in the “metabolic cost” of walking, ie an activity’s energy expenditure or calorie burn. “Step length variability plays a modest, albeit significant role in the metabolic cost of walking,” Grimmitt says.
It’s OK to dawdle
If the purpose of your walk is to clear your mind and relieve stress, then a gentle stroll is enough to do the trick. “There’s plenty of evidence that short walks outdoors have a potent effect on mood, and you do not need to be going at a fast pace to benefit,” Clemes says. “It’s not just the activity itself that boosts mental health, but the location — being outdoors surrounded by nature is particularly helpful for lowering stress and anxiety.”
Recent analysis by a team of researchers from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Cambridge, published in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioural Reviews, found that regular physical activity — especially low-intensity activity such as walking — reduced the risk of depression by 23 per cent and anxiety by 26 per cent.
“The levels of physical activity [required to make a difference] may be more achievable for people who can make smaller lifestyle changes without feeling they need to commit to a high-intensity exercise programme,” said Lee Smith, professor of public health at ARU and lead author of the paper.
Aim for 100 steps per minute
Most studies on the health benefits of walking are based on a “brisk” walking pace of at least 100 steps per minute, the equivalent of about 2.7mph. Tests conducted at University of Massachusetts suggest that 130 steps per minute (about 4mph) constitutes “vigorous walking” for 21 to 60-year-olds. For the over-60s, walking at close to 100 steps a minute is a good goal.
Clemes says that 100 steps per minute “is quicker than many people realise” and that if you can’t manage you should build up to it relative to your current fitness. “If you can easily chat away while walking at that speed, the pace is gentle; if you can talk but not easily it is moderate for you; if you can’t easily hold a full conversation and are puffing it is a brisk pace.”
The more often you can pick up the pace, even in short bursts, the better. Research by the University of Leicester involving more than 400,000 middle-aged adults found that fast daily walkers can have a significantly lower biological age than dawdlers. Professor Tom Yates and his team looked at length of telomeres, the “bumpers” that protect DNA from damage, in participants. With age and bad habits — smoking, poor diet, inactivity — our telomeres shorten, causing accelerated ageing of cells. But brisk walking was found to preserve telomere length, potentially reducing one’s biological age by up to 16 years.
Try to increase your daily step count by 500
As any fitness tracker will tell you, a daily total of 10,000 steps is considered a golden goal for physical activity. Despite being an unscientific target — the figure originated in Japan in the 1960s, as part of a marketing campaign to sell pedometers — researchers at the University of Sydney have shown that 9,000-10,500 steps a day is indeed the amount needed to reduce the risk of an early death or heart-related event.
“It is a great aim,” Clemes says, “but most people currently do about 3,000 steps a day, and increasing that by even 500 steps a day is enough to provide a long-term health boost.”
A University of Massachusetts Amherst study of 2,110 adults showed that totting up at least 7,000 steps a day after the age of 40 resulted in at least a 50 per cent lower risk of premature death. However, the researchers also found that people taking more than 10,000 steps a day rarely outlived those taking at least 7,000. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do more than 10,000 steps a day, though. “There are potentially fitness gains to be had from doing more, but some studies show no additional advantage in terms of longevity,” Clemes says.
The good news is that we are probably walking more now than at other times of year. In one of her own studies, Clemes showed that we walk an average 1,100 more steps a day in summer than winter.
Do you need to walk further than you would run for the same health benefits?
Running is more time-efficient than walking, in terms of the health benefits, but if you hate it you can simply spend more time strolling. In general, you need to walk for at least twice as long as you run to see similar benefits.
A 2011 study in Taiwan found that regular 25-minute runs (or 105-minute walks) resulted in about a 35 per cent lower risk of dying in the following eight years. Its researchers concluded that five minutes of running a day would result in similar health benefits to 15 minutes of brisk walking a day. Meanwhile, the authors of a 2013 study involving 33,000 runners and 15,000 walkers estimated that you would need to walk 4.3 miles at a brisk pace to expend the same amount of energy as you would running 3 miles, and that the walk would take about twice as long. “For many people, walking is just a more manageable option,” says George Morris, a sports scientist at St Mary’s University Twickenham. “It is so much easier to clock up time on your feet throughout the day when walking compared with running.”
Running v walking
Morris says we should all start with walking as a baseline activity for improving our fitness.
“If you have previously been fairly inactive, then any amount of additional walking will get you fitter,” he says. “Bigger benefits come when you walk further and faster, which increases heart and breathing rate and, ultimately, your cardiovascular fitness.”
Walking briskly on varied terrain with a few hills thrown in engages the same muscles used in running, including the hamstrings and quadriceps in the thighs, the iliopsoas muscle at the front of the hips and the gluteus maximus — but with less impact on the joints. Newcomers to running who haven’t allowed their bodies time to adapt to the impact loading often complain of knee, hip and shin pain as a result. But the increased force and energy output of running means it beats walking for other reasons.
“Even if you run slowly, your body, heart and lungs will work harder than when you walk,” Morris says. “This translates into more rapid fitness gains.” The jolt of each stride also helps to strengthen bones and protect against osteoporosis in the hips and legs. Both have their benefits. “If you want to progress to running, that is good as long as you ease into it to minimise short-term injuries,” Morris says. “But for the majority of the population, more walking is enough.”
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