Picking up the pace on your walk helps, even for older adults

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Any amount of walking is good for your health but picking up the pace has significant benefits – and it’s never too late for someone to train to walk faster.

In an analysis published in PLOS One earlier this month, researchers found that frail older adults who deliberately walked faster saw a meaningful improvement in the distance they could travel when instructed to walk for six minutes straight. (Frailty is an age-related syndrome that affects 5 to 17 percent of older adults and is characterized by fatigue, a loss of strength and unexplained weight loss.)

The results show that regardless of your age, the intensity of your workout can lead to greater improvements in physical function, said Daniel Rubin, the lead author of the analysis and an associate professor of anesthesia and critical care at the University of Chicago.

“It’s okay to sweat a little bit, to have your heart racing a little bit, to breathe a little heavier,” Rubin said. “Even as a 79-year-old.”

Researchers wanted to understand if walking faster could help older adults stave off signs of frailty – feeling fatigued, slow and weak. And “walking is such a low-cost, easy, accessible activity,” Rubin said.

When the older adults in the study walked 14 additional steps per minute, compared with their casual pace, they were more likely to benefit from the regular exercise.

“It’s a small amount but you’re just pushing yourself a little bit more to walk faster,” Margaret Danilovich, the senior author of the study and director of clinical strategy at TailorCare. “That’s where you’re going to reap those health benefits.”

Measure your walking cadence to assess your effort

For the analysis, researchers evaluated the walking pace of 102 older adults, median age 79, who lived in retirement communities around Chicago.

Walking cadence, or steps taken per minute, can be a simple way to measure the intensity of the exercise, Rubin said. And, other measurements such as heart rate monitors or the “talk test” – whether a person can still talk while exercising – can be unreliable or too subjective for older adults. (Exactly when does it become too difficult for someone to talk during a workout?)

The volunteers were frail – more than half used a cane or walker – and weren’t particularly active, Rubin said. Before the study, the average participant took around 3,700 to 3,800 steps per day, Danilovich said.

Each retirement community was randomly assigned to one of two groups – casual or high-intensity walking – and the participants walked three days a week for four months.

All of them followed the same progressive training routine – a warmup, stair-stepping, walking with five-pound ankle weights, and walking in different directions. The only difference: The casual group walked at a comfortable pace, and the other group walked as fast as they safely could.

On average, the high-intensity walking group logged 100 steps per minute, and the casual walking group took 77 steps per minute.

After four months, participants in the high-intensity group were more likely to have a meaningful improvement in their physical function, as measured by the distance covered in a six-minute walking test.

“Every step you take is going to be better for your health,” said Danilovich, who was the principal investigator of the trial when she was an assistant professor of physical therapy at Northwestern University. But, “if you really want to maximize the treatment effects, go for intensity.”

To conduct the study, research assistants walked one-on-one with the participants. It’s not clear if the older adults would’ve achieved the same benefits if they trained unsupervised. The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging.

‘Any exercise is better than no exercise’

Roger Fielding, a senior scientist at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, said the study demonstrates cadence is a useful way for older adults to measure and modify their effort while walking. But, whether you’re going fast or slow, “any exercise is better than no exercise.”

“Even if you’re walking at a comfortable pace, there are going to be some meaningful benefits,” said Fielding, who was not involved with the study. And “if you walk at a little faster pace, the benefits are going to be greater,” he said.

With any exercise, whether it’s walking, swimming or running, frequency, intensity and duration matters, Fielding said.

People should aim to walk 7,000 to 8,000 steps per day, said John Schuna, an associate professor of kinesiology at Oregon State University, who was not involved with the study. There’s no evidence to say 10,000 steps a day is the magic number. Last week, a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of 57 studies found that around 5,000 to 7,000 steps a day is associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, dementia and cardiovascular disease.

If your daily total is far below the recommended target, try to incrementally add 500 steps every week to your step count, experts said.

How to speed up on your walks

Map your route. If you have a typical walking route, drive and measure the distance, said Jennifer Schrack, director of the Center on Aging and Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Then time your next walk to understand how fast you’re completing your circuit.

Use a metronome to determine your walking pace. Rubin said his some of patients use a metronome on their smartphone to measure the cadence of their walk and push their pace. Find your casual walking pace by matching your steps with a beat on the metronome, he said. Then, speed it up by five beats per minute and try to match that pace.

Most people of average height tend to walk between 1.1 and 1.3 meters (about 3.6 and 4.3 feet) per second, Schrack said. A slower speed is an indicator of decline in older adults, she said.

“Oftentimes, when there is a slowing with aging, it’s related to some underlying condition,” said Jennifer Brach, a professor of physical therapy at the University of Pittsburgh, who’s a co-author of the study. “So, slowing down is not normal, and we should expect and try to keep our older adults walking at a good pace.”

Add in short bursts of high-intensity walking. One version of interval training is known as “Japanese walking,” where people switch between three-minute sets of a fast and a casual pace for 30 minutes.

If you’re going around a track, walk at a normal pace on the curves and pick up the pace on the straightaways, Brach said.

“I walk every day for exercise. And it’s very easy to get into a habit of maybe going more of a stroll and not really picking up the pace,” Brach said. “But by picking up the cadence, you are increasing the intensity, which has been linked to better outcomes.”

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