For the second time this week, we are writing about heart health and exercise duration. Yesterday, we wrote about how women need less exercise than men to aid their hearts. Today, we’re looking at how longer walks are better than multiple short walks for heart health.
Whenever we write a blog like this, we look back in our own archive to see what we have written in the past. We have almost 2,000 blogs in our archive, so we have covered a lot of topics! We were surprised to see that almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about how walking in bursts burns more calories than taking a long, steady stroll. It takes more calories to stop and start.
But different forms of exercise benefit different aspects of health. While stopping and starting might burn more calories, a steady, sustained walk is better for heart health, according to new research. Walking for about 1,500 steps uninterrupted — or 15 minutes — helps heart health, especially in people who are most sedentary.
The study looked at eight years of medical data and behavior from more than 33,500 people aged 40-70. The researcher saw that, even in the least active people, longer walks were linked to a significantly lower risk of heart problems and death. The average age of the people in the study was 62. The data came from the UK Biobank.
“We tend to place all the emphasis on the number of steps or the total amount of walking but neglect the crucial role of patterns, for example ‘how’ walking is done,” said the coleader of the research, Prof. Emmanuel Stamatakis. “This study shows that even people who are very physically inactive can maximize their heart health benefit by tweaking their walking patterns to walk for longer at a time, ideally for at least 10-15 minutes, when possible.”
The researchers say that, for heart health and longevity, we should forget about the concept of “exercise snacks,” wherein a person works out for a couple of minutes a few times a day. It’s about sustained effort.
“You need to get all the systems engaged and fully operational, and that’s where the health benefits come from,” said Prof Steven Riechman of Texas A&M Univ., who did not work on the study. “The one I particularly thought of, [which] the article did not mention, is that the increase in body temperature is probably not going to occur in less than five minutes of walking.”
Instead of worrying about your accumulated steps, carve out some time and just walk for fifteen minutes. Uninterrupted walking helps more than adding up all those exercise snacks because it gets your body really moving!
