With the rise of smartphones and wearable fitness trackers, the popularity of counting steps has grown. While striving to increase your step count or meet a daily step count goal is a good way to increase your physical activity, step count is not the most important health-centered walking metric to track. Keeping track of and striving to improve your walking speed can actually help you achieve more important fitness goals while supporting your health.
The Importance of Walking Speed
If you want to be healthier and live longer, focus on increasing your walking speed, rather than your daily step count.
Longevity and Cardiovascular Health
Walking faster, rather than longer (i.e., focusing on increasing pace and intensity rather than distance and number of steps), is associated with greater longevity and better cardiovascular health.
A study that looked at nearly 35,000 senior adults found that a person’s average walking pace (down to a tenth of a meter per second), along with their age and gender, can predict life expectancy as accurately (if not more reliably) than a whole host of other measurements. Individuals with an average life expectancy walked about 0.8 meters per second. Individuals who walked one meter per second faster had a longer-than-average life expectancy.
A quicker pace conditions the heart, as the higher intensity of faster walking increases heart rate and the demand on the heart. This conditioning helps to lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, in addition to other chronic health issues such as dementia and certain types of cancer.
Mobility and Fall Risk
A slower walking pace is also strongly associated with future mobility issues and an increased risk of falling. The ability to walk at greater speeds — even just 14 more steps per minute — helps to improve mobility and reduce the risk of falling.
How to Improve Walking Speed
To increase your walking speed, yes, you should practice walking and pacing yourself by measuring your distance and time. However, you can also support an increased walking speed by adopting a regimen of strength and balance exercises designed to help enhance your gait.
These can include strength exercises, such as sit-to-stand, heel raises, and side leg lifts, in addition to balance exercises like single-leg balance, heel-to-toe walking, standing marches, and obstacle courses.
As always, any new fitness routines or increases in difficulty should be introduced gradually, starting with support from a stable surface and only removing hands when comfortable. As you progress, you can even consider adding ankle weights for an increased challenge. Additionally, new exercise routines should be closely monitored by a professional to ensure safety and effectiveness while preventing injuries.
Personalized Fitness Plans to Increase Walking Pace
While focusing on a step count goal is a fine place to start motivating yourself to reach better level of fitness and increased daily physical activity, the more effective metric to measure and challenge yourself with is walking pace. To measure your walking pace, you can use a treadmill that measures walking speed, time yourself while walking a route over a specific distance, or use a fitness tracker that is able to set a timer and measure walking distance. Set goals to increase your speed incrementally, but be careful not to take on too big of a challenge too soon, as this could put you at risk of injury.
We recommend starting a new fitness routine with a personalized walking pace workout designed and supervised by our experienced physical therapists. At FYZICAL, we specialize in helping our clients improve their mobility, comfort, quality of life, and overall health with personalized wellness and fitness plans.
To learn more about the importance of walking pace and working to improve your pace, we welcome you to contact us today.