For many people, walking is the simplest and most doable form of exercise. All that’s required is slipping on a pair of comfy shoes and opening your door. But do you need to do anything special to reap the health benefits of a daily stroll?
There is plenty of misinformation out there on this subject. Common advice like aiming for 10,000 steps a day makes it seem like maximizing the impact of walking means covering long distances or keeping up a heart-thudding pace. But much of this advice is based on folk wisdom, not science.
What does the research actually show? A new study suggests the key to getting the greatest benefits from your walking routine isn’t meeting some arduous but arbitrary goal. It’s actually to pause and stop to smell the roses more.
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A reminder of the health benefits of walking
Before we dig into the details of the study, let’s remind ourselves just how impactful a simple daily walk can be. One massive study of 140,000 adults from the American Cancer Society found that walking just two hours a week — around 15 minutes a day — can reduce your risk of disease and prolong your life.
Walking helps you live longer, but it’s also good for your brain right now. A recent study published in the journal Neurology found just an hour or two of moderately aerobic exercise could shave five years off your mental age.
Those findings apply to many forms of exercise. But there are specific benefits to walking as well. Neuroscience has discovered that the rhythm of moving your feet and the light attention demanded by your surroundings when you walk boosts creativity and helps you find ways around mental blocks. Perhaps that’s why many of history’s greatest thinkers were avid walkers.
How stopping to smell the roses makes walking even healthier
So how do you maximize your chances of realizing all these impressive benefits? Not, it turns out, by driving yourself to walk the furthest or the fastest possible. For a recent study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B a team of researchers measured the oxygen consumption of study participants as they engaged in short bouts of between 10 and 240 seconds of walking on a treadmill.
What they discovered is that our bodies are kind of like cars. Just as you need to really step on it to get your car up to speed, our bodies burn 20 to 60 percent more energy (and therefore oxygen) while they’re accelerating. Cruising along at a steady speed burns less fuel both for humans and motor vehicles.
This means that the walks that burned the most energy, and therefore probably had the biggest impact on fitness and health, weren’t those where people bombed along with a singular focus on tearing through the miles. It was when people paused, took a breather, and then started up again.
The takeaway (and a couple of caveats)
The takeaway here is that, if your aim is to maximize the health benefits of your daily stroll, you should feel free to have a chat, admire the view, or take a breather. Rather than undermining your goals, this stop-start approach will actually help you squeeze more impact out of your walks.
There are a couple of caveats to keep in mind here though. First, all the study participants were healthy young adults, so these recommendations might not apply if you have specific health concerns. Listen to your doctor, not some writer on the internet.
Second, they’re definitely not for you if you’re a Crossfit champion or veteran triathlete. These findings are crucial “for people with low aerobic fitness and increased time to reach a metabolic steady state,” the researchers write. If you’re barely winded five miles into a brisk run then stopping to smell the roses isn’t going to add anything but joy to your workout.
For the rest of us less dedicated exercisers though, the good news applies. You don’t need to count steps or sweat up steep inclines to get the greatest benefits from your walking routine. Those are great goals if they work for you and your level of fitness.
But if you’re looking for a manageable way to squeeze a little more health out of your walks, consider pausing when you feel like it. Those rests aren’t just making exercise a little more pleasant and doable; they’re also likely making your daily walk a little bit better for you.
