Is Walking Exercise?

A dissection of walking, its benefits and its place in a health and fitness regime

From Banach et al

Most readers would probably have the magic number of 10,000 steps come to mind when thinking about walking. That is, that’s their daily step count goal. Fewer would know the origin of this harks back to the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. Specifically a marketing campaign for a pedometer company which made the “Manpo-kei” or “10,000 steps meter”.
More interestingly, though, as happens from time to time (usually more because of anecdata or broscience or similar rather than marketing) these heuristics become supported by science many years later. Specifically, I am thinking about much of the bodybuilder’s advice from the 60’s and 70’s being more recently supported by science. As with the bodybuilders, this 10,000 step heuristic has been found to be a helpful in the scientific literature number for most people to shoot for when it comes to health benefits.

Back to walking.

Is Walking Exercise?

Not all walking is created equal, intrinsically this statement probably makes sense to you all, but let’s double click on it and flesh it out a bit.

Intensity

There’s an enormous difference between a short amble to the local coffee shop, perhaps with you dog which is marking every lamp post as you go, and say walking uphill at a good pace at altitude. Intrinsically these two things feel significantly different, likewise metabolically they are very different. One of them may have your heart rate just above what it is whilst reading this (perhaps you’re multitasking and reading this on your morning walk to coffee), the other will have your heart rate elevated, your breathing harder and subsequently be much more metabolically taxing.

Many of you are probably thinking things like: what about at altitude, or in the heat or carrying a heavy backpack?
The answer is yes, these could well constitute exercise depending on your capacity (see below). As could walking with blood flow restriction at times (more on this in a future article).

Capacity

I previously wrote an article on surprising indicators of longevity, one of which is in fact walking speed. This speaks to capacity in that our capacity will diminish over time (much less so if we work to prevent it, I have an article on this upcoming, so make sure you subscribe to avoid missing it) and as such walking becomes a larger proportion of our maximum capacity - thus meaning it is an indicator of longevity.

Think of your capacity as the room you are sitting in, training will raise the roof, and detraining will lower it. Similarly as we age the roof slowly creeps down. The capacity required for walking is perhaps your sitting height, running may be standing and really vigorous activity would be jumping height. Great, so early in our life there’s lots of room between the roof and our height when sitting; walking is a small portion of our capacity but as the roof slowly lowers, walking becomes a greater percentage of our total capacity.

So as a percentage of your capacity, and thus as a training stimulus, walking changes across a life span. It also may change in phases of things like illness or injury.

What is Walking, if it’s not Exercise?

This may seem a bit pedantic, but it certainly helps people organise their thinking and plan their activity to best optimise for their goals. So here we are, at the definitions.

Exercise: planned, goal oriented and structured.
Physical Activity: all movement.

Thus you can see, all exercise is physical activity but not all physical activity is exercise. You may have intuited that walking is one of the activities that can fall either side of the definition and only some of this is to do with whether it is as rigid as the above definition of exercise sounds. In a relatively famous study I talked about in my piece on “The Placebo Effect”, hotel maids told their work constituted exercise saw significant health improvements so perhaps mindset matters here too.

Why this is important however, is that many people who are young, fit and healthy tell themselves and others, that walking is their exercise. Whilst a high amount of walking is certainly one of the healthier things we can do (and I’d encourage these people to keep their walking up), it doesn’t necessarily constitute exercise for people who’s heart rate is 50% of their max heart rate (or less) during the walking. Again, this is not a binary it’s a spectrum and for some folks or even on some walks it may well be a meaningful stimulus but by and large intensity likely needs to be higher for this to constitute exercise. *Note this doesn’t apply to people who may be very sedentary, and quite unhealthy getting into exercise where walking may be the answer initially at least.

So to answer the question more specifically, for most people most of their walking is largely physical activity more than exercise (or to throw a spanner in the definition works; an “activity of daily living”).

Why is Walking Healthy?

There are actually two questions we could answer here (English is fun isn’t it): what makes us say walking healthy? And what is the mechanism by which it improves health? Let’s address them in that order specifically.

What Makes us say That Walking Healthy?

As most of you would have noticed from the figure at the top of this article, at least in one study (but there are many similar ones, all directionally aligned), every 1000 step increase in walking saw a decrease of all cause mortality by 15% and every 500 step increase in walking saw a 7% decrease in cardiovascular mortality.
That’s right, increasing step counts can improve health and longevity significantly.

Whilst the literature is in relative universal agreement that increases in walking are associated with increasing health benefits, there’s less agreement on whether this effect has a ceiling or even starts to become excessive (as you can see in the figure below).

What is the Mechanism by Which Walking Improves Health?

This is likely the source of confusion here for most folks when it comes to the question of whether walking is exercise (we will ignore the ever lowering bar in an increasingly sedentary society). The benefits of walking, are very closely aligned (if not identical) to many of the benefits of exercise. And as covered above, there’s likely some overlap where walking is indeed exercise. But not always.

Indulge me for a second, please. A source of frustration to me when reading research and listening to researchers talk; in the well intentioned effort to be ‘evidence based’ there’s a seeming disregard of first principles, basic physiological reasoning and extrapolation of learnings from research studies at times. This goes beyond walking, but it manifests in the walking literature. In zooming out and trying to make sense of something like walking being so universally helpful to health and trying to contextualise this to explain potential reasons for this I think we are a little lost. I have already covered some of this, and it is the backbone of the article; that is walking cannot solely be helpful as a source of exercise. As covered already; this is because of intensity, capacity etc: the goal would be an appropriate stimulus given the capacity of the individual.

So if it isn’t exercise what is it?

Addition via Subtraction

Those who are familiar with the longevity space and those who have read about or watched a program about “blue zones” may be starting to connect the dots of where I am heading already. These “blue zones” (areas with the highest concentrations of centenarians) have been extensively researched, looking for commonalities and lessons that can be learned. Interestingly, very few of these folks do all of the things we consider part of a healthy lifestyle perfectly (sleep, diet, exercise, community, stress management, purpose), a concept I touched on here.

One thing that is very common in these blue zones may be the answer as to the benefits of walking. That is, a lack of sedentary behaviour. In itself, sedentary behaviour is linked with a myriad of health problems. Similarly there is evidence that breaking up prolonged periods of sedentary behaviour is helpful to metabolic health and risk of diseases such as cardiovascular disease. So perhaps walking, or more specifically step count, is a proxy for general movement and lack of sedentary behaviour.

This is not to suggest that exercise isn’t valuable, nor that it can truly be disentangled from reduced sedentary behaviour but in some of the observational data around people who do high amounts of exercise and are otherwise quite sedentary (read most elite athletes), the nuance is somewhat teased out and they certainly look to have independent benefits, which are likely additive for health. My gut here is you should be doing as much physical activity and exercise as fits with your lifestyle and goals, whilst simultaneously minimising sedentary time as much as possible. As usual; simple, not necessarily easy.

Other Benefits of Walking

There is some interesting research on walking and creativity (and some showing the inverse; that sedentary behaviour negatively impacts it - here we are again trying to disentangle the two), which I can personally attest to (to break 4th wall a bit, it’s where I do a lot of thinking about this newsletter). However, not to fall victim to the same mistakes mentioned above, I strongly doubt this is about walking as much as it is about low intensity movement and letting the mind wonder a bit.

Similarly, much of my walking (and I realise how privileged this is, with an appropriate amount of gratitude) is in nature. This time in nature is in itself a very healthy thing, as discussed in this piece on biophilia.

There is also a good amount of literature in support of walking for management of back pain.

A Note on Step Trackers

As I have touched on previously, wearables have certain metrics that are measured (classically things like pulse rate) and then metrics which are estimated by algorithms (for example sleep). This may not seem like an issue and on the surface it isn’t, except estimations compounds potential errors in measurement.

Enter step counting. This is classically done via accelerometers, effectively looking for a cyclical movement that approximates arm swing. This isn’t a bad way to get a good indication of step count for the day, but as someone who’s in this space and playing with these things I can share the following anecdotes:

• Carrying something on the hand the step counter is on means you’ll likely not have those steps counted.

• Hand grinding coffee will probably accrue some steps for you.

• If you’re on a call and holding your phone to your ear (if anyone still does this) or on a video call, you probably won’t be counted as walking.

All of this is to say; the trackers are pretty good, not perfect.

As mentioned numerous times, probably first in my article on continuous lactate monitors, trends are much more important than numbers. Which is to say, when your step counter says 10,000 steps, it’s almost certain you didn’t do that many, though you were likely somewhere between 9,000 & 11,000 for example. But where the real value lies is if you consistently find your counter says 10,000 on days you feel like you’ve been decently active, there’s a good indication you need to try do a little more if it says 6,000 at 4pm or that you’ve had a big day if it says 12,000. Find your normal range, take action if you are outside of it and don’t get super hung up on a certain number.

Take Home Messages:

• You should probably be walking more.

• Walking is one of the healthiest things we can do, but largely as addition via subtraction of sedentary behaviour.

• You need to be stressing your system to adapt and get the true benefits of exercise, for most people walking isn’t enough without added stressors to achieve this.

• Exercising enough for your goals and minimising sedentary behaviour is ideal, but any mixture of the two that fits with your life is better than not - don’t let better be the enemy of good.

References:

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