One long walk per day is better than multiple short walks when it comes to heart health, a new study finds.
If you aren’t very physically active, have no fear. A new study suggests that going on just one long walk per day can have significant benefits for heart health.
The study, which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal, included nearly 34,000 people in the United Kingdom who typically walked fewer than 8,000 steps per day – a level they considered “suboptimal”.
Researchers grouped them into four categories based on how long they tended to walk: under five minutes, five to 10 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes, and 15 minutes or longer. About three in four participants got most of their daily steps in walks of less than 10 minutes.
But those who went on longer walks were healthier, the study found. People who accumulated most of their daily steps in longer bouts had a lower risk of heart disease and death from any cause, compared with people who accumulated their steps in shorter walks.
The risk of heart disease was about 13 per cent among people who mostly walked for under five minutes, 11 per cent for those who walked in five to 10 minute spurts, 7.7 per cent for those who walked in 10- to 15-minute bouts, and 4.4 per cent for those who tended to walk for 15 minutes or longer.
That means people who got most of their steps in 15-minute or longer walks had roughly one-third of the heart disease risk of those who mostly walked in stints of less than five minutes.
The benefits were greater for the most sedentary people in the study. Among people who got under 5,000 steps per day, there were even stronger links between longer walks and lower risk of heart disease and death.
The findings come amid increased scrutiny on how daily step counts affect our health. Walking briskly can increase the heart rate, improve circulation, lower blood pressure, and help people lose weight.
While getting 10,000 steps per day has become a wellness mantra, researchers found in August that people start seeing the health benefits at around 7,000 daily steps.
Last week, another report found that older women who walked at least 4,000 steps just once or twice per week had lower mortality and heart disease risks than women who never hit this step count.
The latest study has some limitations, notably that people who got most of their steps in shorter bouts tended to be more sedentary overall, were more likely to be overweight, and were less likely to have a university degree – all factors associated with worse health on their own.
The researchers tried to account for these and other factors that could have influenced the results, but they still can’t prove that the participants’ walking habits actually caused the difference in heart disease and mortality risks.
“This new study provides evidence that different step bout length patterns might affect mortality and [cardiovascular disease] risk, but we absolutely can’t be certain about cause and effect,” Kevin McConway, an emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University in the UK, said in a statement. He was not involved with the study.
Even so, the researchers said the findings could help inform exercise guidelines, particularly for people who are not very active, to help them “incorporate longer, purposeful walking sessions into their daily routines to optimise health outcomes”.