Research has shown that in adults who are not physically active, how steps are accumulated can have a greater impact on long-term health prognosis than the total number of steps per day. In other words, the analysis showed that the overall risk of death and the risk of developing cardiovascular disease were significantly lower in people who practiced long, uninterrupted walking for a certain period of time than walking with repeated short movements.
Professor Borja del Poso Cruz‘s team at the Department of Sports Science at the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Sports at the European University of Madrid, Spain, conducted a large-scale population-based cohort study using data from the UK Biobank and analyzed the association between walking patterns and long-term health outcomes in adults with low physical activity.
The researchers included 33,560 adults who walked less than 8,000 steps per day on average. The participants’ average number of steps per day was 5,165, and they were all generally in the ‘low-activity group’. The researchers focused on not just the number of steps, but also how long continuous walking was done during the day.
Walking patterns were classified into four groups according to continuous walking time: less than 5 minutes, more than 5 minutes but less than 10 minutes, more than 10 minutes but less than 15 minutes, and more than 15 minutes. 42.9% of all participants did most of their walking in very short walks of less than 5 minutes, and 33.5% mainly walked in the 5-10 minute range. 15.5% of people mainly walked for 10 to 15 minutes continuously, and only 8.0% of people had the habit of walking continuously for more than 15 minutes. The researchers followed them for an average of 9.5 years and analyzed death from all causes and the occurrence of cardiovascular disease.
As a result, the risk of death gradually decreased as continuous walking time increased. The overall risk of death in the group where most of the walking was less than 5 minutes was 4.36% on average, but it decreased to 1.83% in the group that focused on walking for 5 to 10 minutes. The risk of death in the group that walked continuously for 10 to 15 minutes was 0.84%, and in the group that walked continuously for more than 15 minutes, it was lowest at 0.80%.
This trend was even more evident in the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. During the follow-up period, the cumulative cardiovascular disease risk was 13.03% in the less than 5-minute walking group, but decreased to 11.09% in the 5-10 minute walking group. In the group that walked continuously for 10 to 15 minutes, it dropped further to 7.71%, and in the group that walked continuously for more than 15 minutes, it recorded the lowest figure at 4.39%.
This effect was especially evident in very inactive adults who walked less than 5,000 steps per day. In this group, regardless of the total number of steps, the risk of both death and cardiovascular disease was significantly lower the longer one walked at a time.
The researchers explained, “This shows that for people with low physical activity, even if they do not significantly increase their daily step goal, they can lower their health risks just by having a walking habit of deliberately walking for a certain period of time instead of repeating short movements.” The explanation is that this shows that not only the ‘quantity’ of walking, but also the ‘structure’ and ‘pattern’ should be considered important in public health strategies.
The results of this study were recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, published by the American College of Internal Medicine.
