- Physical activity like walking is an important part of a healthy lifestyle.
- Research is ongoing regarding the benefits of physical activity in various populations.
- One study focusing on low-income and Black participants found that fast walking may decrease mortality risk by almost 20%.
Current guidelines from the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion say that adults should get “150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity” each week, and this can include activities like brisk walking.
The results of the study suggest that regular walking may help lower mortality risk. The most pronounced mortality reduction was related to fast walking.
The researchers who conducted this study note that there is somewhat limited data focusing on low-income and low-income Black individuals when it comes to “walking and other leisure-time physical activity.”
For the study, they used data from the Southern Community Cohort Study, which includes participants from twelve southeastern states. About two-thirds of this cohort is Black, and over half of the cohort’s participants made less than $15,000 a year when they enrolled in the study.
For the current research, the main sample included 79,856 participants, who provided information on their daily walking habits, including speed and time.
Walking speed fell into two broad categories. Slow walking included things like walking at work and light exercise. Fast walking included things like brisk walking or climbing stairs.
For the time, participants were divided into categories based on ranges of walking time. Researchers also had data on things like smoking, alcohol intake, and leisure-time physical activity. Based on leisure-time physical activity, researchers divided participants into the three categories of “inactive, fairly active, and active.”
Researchers were able to consider the overall healthiness of participants’ lifestyles, and they had data on death and major causes of death.
The average follow-up time with participants was just under 17 years, and throughout this time, about 27,000 deaths occurred. The greatest number of deaths, around 13,500, were from cardiovascular disease.
About 48% of participants did not report fast walking, and about one-third walked slowly for more than 3 hours each day. For participants in this slow-walking category, there was 4% decreased mortality risk, but this was not statistically significant.
However, researchers did find that slow walking for over an hour each day could lower mortality related to all cardiovascular diseases, though the strongest association was with a lower risk of death from ischemic heart disease.
Fast walking appeared to offer the most benefit, with almost a 20% decrease in mortality associated with 15 minutes of fast walking daily.
After adjusting for lifestyle factors, the association between mortality and slow and fast walking became less. However, the association for fast walking was still highly significant.
Sensitivity analyses revealed that fast walking appeared to most reduce risk for death from cardiovascular disease, particularly cardiovascular disease death caused by heart diseases.
The main finding of stratified analyses was that the association between fast walking and lower mortality appeared to be stronger for participants who did not smoke and those with higher income. They note that they did not observe significant variations for body mass index, comorbidities, or race.
For participants who engaged in slow walking, doing more fast walking helped to further decrease mortality risk.
Finally, researchers found that the association between fast walking and lower mortality was not dependent upon participants’ leisure-time physical activity. For participants doing any leisure-time activity, longer amounts of fast walking led to more benefits.
This research primarily focused on low-income and Black individuals, so more research can confirm similar findings in other groups, and the results may not be generalizable to other groups.
Additionally, some data, like information on daily walking and lifestyle, came from participant reporting, and some of this data might not be correct.
Researchers acknowledge that some participants’ walking reports could have included “other types of physical activity” like climbing stairs, so misclassification is possible.
Since they only looked at physical activity at baseline, they were not able to assess changes that could have happened in physical activity and how this could have affected outcomes. Researchers acknowledge risk for residual confounding and reverse causation.
They suggest that future research can also see how factors like psychosocial stressors and material well-being play into fast walking and mortality risk.
Finally, sensitivity analyses included participants who had missing data on walking and participants “who died within the first 2 years.” The timing of death could introduce possible bias.
Cardiologist Patrick Kee, MD, PhD, Vital Heart & Vein in Houston, who was not involved in the study, noted the following cautions when it comes to this research speaking to Medical News Today:
“The ability to walk briskly may primarily serve as a proxy for overall physical fitness and the absence of severe comorbidities rather than an independent driver of improved outcomes. Individuals with obesity, frailty, advanced heart failure, chronic lung disease, a history of stroke with hemiplegia, or significant musculoskeletal issues may be underrepresented, and the self-reported nature of walking data further constrains the validity of the conclusions. Notably, the study does not establish causation nor does it validate brisk walking as an effective intervention to reduce cardiovascular mortality.”
“Brisk walking may primarily function as a marker of physical fitness and functional capacity rather than an independent health intervention,” Kee added.
Overall, this study emphasizes the benefits of regular fast walking, which can help with informing recommendations.
Kanwar Kelley, MD, JD, a triple board-certified in Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery (ENT), Obesity Medicine, and Lifestyle Medicine, and cofounder and CEO of Side Health in Orinda, CA, who was similarly not involved in the study, noted the following regarding the clinical implications to MNT:
“By recognizing that there is a dose effect to walking, recommendations can be better tailored to get the most effect from the intervention. Recognizing that there may be a difference between slow-walking and fast-walking, especially in specific populations, can have a similar effect to personalized medicine by recommending physical activities that may offer the most benefit to a particular patient.”
“While evidence suggests that walking in general can improve outcomes, the evidence in this paper can refine that recommendation and be more effective at setting goals. While not every individual can immediately engage in fast walking, using evidence such as that provided in this paper gives medical practitioners and physicians more leverage to help patients achieve a specific goal,” said Kelley.
Finally, David Cutler, MD, board-certified family medicine physician at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, also not involved in the research, told us that, “the fact that this population is at the greatest risk of premature death due to their low socioeconomic and minority status offers great hope for improving health outcomes in these populations.”
“Traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as controlling blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, managing diabetes, and stopping smoking need to be supplemented with the evidence-based science that strenuous exercise like 15 minutes of fast walking daily can reduce your chance of dying prematurely,” Cutler advised.