Walking for Just 15 Minutes a Day Slashes Your Risk of Death—If You Go at This Pace
Oftentimes, the biggest deterrent for lacing up your sneakers is feeling intimidated by the workout ahead. Maybe going on a run leaves you drained and your knees aching. Or perhaps taking a 10,000-step walk is just too much to fit into your busy day. However, more and more research is emerging that supports the theory that some exercise is better than none.
The latest such study comes from epidemiologists at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who determined that a 15-minute daily walk may be all it takes to stay healthy—that is, if you go at a certain pace.
RELATED: This Step Count Slashes Your Risk of Death by Nearly Half—And It’s Less Than 10,000.
How a 15-minute daily walk can transform your health.
The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, sought to understand better how walking pace affects mortality.
The researchers were particularly interested in how walking pace contributes to the health of underrepresented groups, as many previous studies focused on middle- to high-income white participants. This study tracked the health data of nearly 80,000 predominantly low-income and Black individuals across 12 southeastern U.S. states.
As a press release explains, this is important because low-income populations often have less access to healthcare and health insurance and “are more likely to reside in impoverished, highly polluted communities with limited access to safe walking spaces.”
To arrive at their findings, the researchers collected self-reported data from the participants on the number of minutes they spent each day walking and at what pace. “Walking slowly” was considered light exercise, walking the dog, moving around the house, etc. “Walking fast” included things like climbing stairs, going on a brisk walk, or engaging in higher intensity exercise.
“Our research has shown that fast walking as little as 15 minutes a day was associated with a nearly 20% reduction in total mortality, while a smaller reduction in mortality was found in association with more than three hours of daily slow walking,” shared lead investigator Wei Zheng, MD, PhD, a professor at the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center. “This benefit remained strong even after accounting for other lifestyle factors and was consistent across various sensitivity analyses.”
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Other research shows how walking speed can affect longevity.
As Best Life recently reported, research has shown that an increased gait speed is linked to better cognitive health, improved aging biomarkers, and a significantly lower risk of heart failure.
If you’re curious how your walking speed stacks up, Sara Bonnes, MD, medical director of the Healthy Longevity Clinic at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, recently told Business Insider that she uses the following test.
Measure a distance of roughly 20 feet, then time how quickly you can walk that distance (you may need to do a little warm-up walk ahead of the path before starting your stopwatch).
According to Bonnes, if you can walk it under six seconds, you have “high-functioning gait speed.”
“Meanwhile, a 2005 study suggests that taking longer than 8.6 seconds to walk that distance is associated with a higher risk of fall or hospitalization,” Best Life noted.