Longevity, cardiovascular durability improve with just 1 or 2 walks per week
Weekend warriors who take brisk walks of around four miles just once or twice per week enjoy lower cardiovascular and all-cause mortality than their sedentary peers.
In fact, they’re almost as long-lived as exercise buffs who take three to seven daily strolls each week.
So found researchers at UCLA who analyzed data from a nationally representative cohort of more than 3,100 adults in the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The participants were outfitted with waist-worn accelerometers, allowing the team to investigate dose-response associations between the number of days with 8,000 steps or more and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality over a 10-year follow-up period.
In their study report, published March 28 in JAMA Network Open [1], senior author Beate Ritz, MD, PhD, of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health and David Geffen School of Medicine and colleagues note they adjusted for numerous potential confounders. These included age, sex, race and ethnicity, insurance status, marital status, smoking, comorbidities and average daily step counts.
A strong majority of the cohort, 62.5%, took 8,000 steps or more three to seven days a week.
Those hitting the 8,000-step goal—close to 4 miles for many if not most adults—once or twice per week comprised 17.2% of the field, and 20.4% took no exercise-level strolls at all on a weekly basis.
Over the 10-year follow-up, all-cause mortality befell 439 participants (14.2%) while cardiovascular mortality hit 148 participants (5.3%).
Compared with participants who never walked 8,000 steps or more, all-cause mortality risk was significantly lower among the moderate and heavy walkers.
Further, the dose-response association for both all-cause and cardiovascular mortality risk was curvilinear, and the protective association with walks of 8,000 steps or more plateaued at three days per week.
Also, the association remained close to constant among participants who put in as many as 6,000 to 10,000 steps per day, suggesting more isn’t necessarily better for those whose primary desired outcome is longevity.
Meaningful health benefits readily available
In their discussion the authors comment that, for people who have a hard time fitting regular exercise time into their weekdays, “achieving recommended daily steps only a couple days per week can have meaningful health benefits.”
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In line with the proliferation and popularity of smartphones and wearable devices that count daily steps, monitoring and targeting daily steps has been considered a practical strategy for promoting physical activity in the population by clinicians, patients and public health professionals.
The study’s lead author is Kosuke Inoue, MD, PhD, who is now with Kyoto University in Japan.
Step counting a sensible first step toward health goals
In invited commentary [2], James Sawalla Guseh, MD, and Jose Figueroa, MD, MPH, both of Harvard, state that Inoue, Ritz and co-authors “provide valuable insight into the potential health benefits of low-frequency, step-based physical activity goals. This evidence supports the emerging and popular idea that step counting, which does not require consideration of exercise duration or intensity, can offer guidance toward robust and favorable health outcomes.”
However, Guseh and Figueroa emphasize, physical durability is just one measure of exercise’s desirable effects:
[I]t is important to note that these data merit replication and likely miss other important dimensions of health, such as neurologic health. Recent evidence indicated that higher thresholds (e.g., 9,800 steps per day) and higher intensities may be important for higher-order benefits, including reductions in incident dementia.
Both the study and the commentary on it are available in full for free.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.