{"id":5484,"date":"2019-05-30T14:20:51","date_gmt":"2019-05-30T18:20:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.willclower.com\/blog\/?p=5484"},"modified":"2019-05-31T19:44:23","modified_gmt":"2019-05-31T23:44:23","slug":"walk-walk-walk-and-walk-some-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/?p=5484","title":{"rendered":"Walk, Walk, Walk and Walk Some More"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

It sometimes feels like, if you want to truly make a difference in your health, you need to hit the gym every day or make every workout as intense as possible. But new research suggests that simply walking more can have a real impact on lifespan. In fact, people in the study who walked just 150 minutes a week or more had a 20 percent\u00a0lower risk of premature death, compared to those who walked less.<\/p>\n

Even for people who didn\u2019t meet those 150 recommended minutes of activity per week, walking at least a little bit was still better than getting no exercise at all, found the\u00a0American Journal of Preventive Medicine<\/em>\u00a0study<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lead author Alpa Patel, Ph.D., a researcher with the American Cancer Society, says the study is good news for anyone who worries that walking doesn\u2019t count as exercise. \u201cIn our study, close to 95 percent of people who engaged in any physical activity did some walking\u2014but for half of those people, walking was the only moderate to vigorous exercise they got,\u201d she says. \u201cNow we can see that it really does have real benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The study, which followed nearly 140,000 participants for an average of 13 years, compared adults who got no physical activity at all, those whose only exercise was walking, and those who walked plus did other types of exercise. It also compared people who got more than the recommended 150 minutes of activity per week and those who got less.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The participants were mostly senior citizens, with an average age of 70. During the study\u2019s follow-up period, about 43,000 of them died.<\/p>\n

Compared to people who reported getting some physical activity at the start of the study (but less than two hours a week), those who reported getting no activity at all were 26 percent\u00a0more likely to have died. Those who got got between 2.5 and five hours of physical activity a week, on the other hand, had a 20 percent\u00a0lower risk of death.<\/p>\n

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Whether the participants achieved their 150 minutes a week of physical activity through only walking or through other activities didn\u2019t seem to matter; both groups reaped similar longevity benefits. In the walking-only group, those who walked the most were better protected against death from respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and cancer than those who walked the least.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This wasn\u2019t surprising to the researchers, because walking has previously been associated with a lower risk of heart disease, diabetes, and breast and colon cancers. But Patel was a bit surprised that the people who only walked got almost as much benefit as those who got other types of exercise as well.<\/p>\n

Only half of U.S. adults\u2014and even fewer adults 65 and older\u2014meet the recommended guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week. For those people, Patel says, simply aiming to meet that threshold could have real implications on longevity.<\/p>\n

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The average pace participants in the study walked at was 3 miles per hour, or a 20-minute mile. \u201cIt\u2019s faster than you\u2019d walk in the grocery store, and it\u2019s enough to get your heart rate up a little bit, but it\u2019s not like they were power walking or jogging,\u201d says Patel. \u201cWalking is the most common type of physical activity that people engage in in the United States, so I was very, very happy to see these results.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

When the researchers compared individuals who got more than 150 minutes of activity to those who got less, they did not include the small percentage of people who reported getting no activity at all. \u201cPeople who are completely inactive, especially in this age range, may be that way because of underlying health reasons that keep them from being able to walk,\u201d says Patel. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to overestimate the benefits of walking, so we only wanted to include people who were healthy enough to\u00a0get around.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The researchers also excluded people with chronic health conditions from their study, and controlled for factors such as smoking status and obesity. Still, the study could only find an association between walking and longer life, not a cause-and-effect relationship.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

For people who enjoy more vigorous forms of exercise, there\u2019s no reason to stop; other studies have shown that higher-intensity workouts also have benefits of their own. But for the millions of Americans who aren\u2019t even getting the minimum recommendation for physical activity, Patel says the evidence in support of walking more\u2014at any age\u2014is strong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It sometimes feels like, if you want to truly make a difference in your health, you need to hit the gym every day or make every workout as intense as … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7274,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[494],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mlcmmqmgggev.i.optimole.com\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/f:best\/https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/iStock-936370860.jpg?fit=682%2C512&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7Qv5g-1qs","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5364,"url":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/?p=5364","url_meta":{"origin":5484,"position":0},"title":"Taking the stairs may boost energy more than drinking caffeinated beverages","author":"Will Clower","date":"April 28, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"For young women running on little sleep, 10 minutes of stair walking increased energy more than the amount of caffeine in a soda or half a cup of coffee, according to a small study. 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