Is It Better To Have One Long Walk Or Many Short Ones?

It’s a common dilemma: little and often or longer but less frequent. When it comes to walking, it’s better to pick the former.

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New research suggests it’s not just the amount you walk – it’s how. The results of a large cohort study suggest it is better to take one long stroll than break up your walk into several shorter bursts, specifically when it comes to heart health and mortality risk.

According to researchers writing in Annals of Internal Medicine: “Although physical activity recommendations increasingly consider daily step counts, it remains unclear whether step accumulation patterns - short versus sustained longer bouts - affect associations with mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) among suboptimally active populations.” 

To find out, the researchers scoured UK Biobank data, comparing the length of activity to all-cause mortality and cardiovascular problems. 

Participants were only included if they took less than 8,000 steps on average each day and were free of both cardiovascular disease and cancer at the very start of the study. In the end, this involved a total of 33,560 people with a mean age of 62 years, who were categorized into one of four camps depending on how long or how short bursts of activity tended to be, ranging from less than 5 minutes to more than 15 minutes. 

Participants were then split once again. This time into a more sedentary group (fewer than 5,000 steps a day) and a less sedentary group (between 5,000 and 7,999 steps a day). 

Over the course of the study, there were 735 deaths and 3,119 cardiovascular events. Both were positively correlated with lower bursts of activity, with participants reporting average bursts of less than 5 minutes facing the highest risk – a 4.36% risk of all-cause mortality and a 13.03% risk of experiencing a cardiovascular event over an almost 10-year period. In contrast, those who walked in bursts lasting 15 minutes or longer displayed the lowest risk – a 0.8% risk of all-cause mortality and a 4.39% risk of a cardiovascular event over the same period. 

Medium-sized bursts fell somewhere between the two, with bouts of activity lasting 5 to 10 minutes associated with 1.83% risk of death and 11.09% risk of cardiovascular event. Meanwhile, bouts of activity between 10 and 15 equated to a 0.84% risk of death and 7.71% risk of cardiovascular event.

While factors such as age, alcohol consumption and BMI were taken into consideration, it is important to mention correlation doesn’t mean causation – other factors may be at play here. For example, it may be that some participants’ shorter walking session is linked to an underlying health problem not identified in the study or that those who walk for longer are more likely to engage in muscle-strengthening activities and other exercises beneficial for heart health. Also of note, the measurements on walking duration were taken at the very start of the study in a “one-time” event, so any changes in behavior between then and the follow-up may not be accounted for.

Still, the researchers say the results highlight the importance of walking for longer bursts, particularly for those living a more sedentary lifestyle. Indeed, the effect was particularly noticeable for individuals who walked less per day overall (i.e. the less than 5,000 steps camp).

This is not the first piece of research to link step count to health, though the commonly touted 10,000-steps-a-day target is pretty much arbitrary with some studies suggesting 7,000 should be the new ideal. In fact, the 10,000 steps has never been the advice of clinicians. Rather, in a very capitalistic turn, the recommendation of a Japanese pedometer company - their product “Manpo-Kei” translates to “10,000 steps meter”. 

The study was published in Annals of Internal Medicine.