That way we can meet the minimum exercise recommendations of many U.S. We’re told to do our walking at a “brisk” pace. Walking has been linked to a variety of health benefits, including a lower risk of dying prematurely from heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and breast and colon cancer. Health officials are always encouraging those of us who can to lace up our walking shoes and go for a stroll.Īnd with good reason. 7, 2019 How fast is a ‘brisk’ walk? Researchers offer a simple way to measure walking intensityīy Susan Perry | MinnPost contributing writer How fast is a ‘brisk’ walk? Researchers offer a simple way to measure walking intensityīy Susan Perry | MinnPost contributing writerįeb. In the meantime, if you fall into one of those older age groups, just keep walking at any pace you can.Īs Aguiar notes, “walking for exercise is a low-cost, low-skill, feasible activity choice which has the potential to drastically improve people’s health.” Tudor-Locke and her colleagues are continuing their research to figure out walking-intensity thresholds for two more groups: people in their 40s and 50s and those aged 60 and older. Leg length, height, weight, gender and other factors will, of course, affect the precise number of steps that constitute moderate or vigorous activity for any individual walker.įurthermore, the findings apply only to adults aged 21 to 40.īut it looks as though we’ll have steps-per-minute recommendations for older adults soon.
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The pace recommendations that emerged from this study are heuristic - in other words, they are, as the researchers explain, “grounded in evidence, but may not be necessarily precise.” “If you just tell people to walk at their normal speed, they probably are going to walk about 100 steps per minute,” says Elroy Aguiar, one of the authors of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in a released statement. In fact, some of them struggled to walk at a slower pace. Interestingly (and encouragingly) the researchers found that the natural walking pace of 90 percent of the study’s participants was at the moderate-pace level. Vigorous-intensity walking (six METs) began at about 4 miles per hour - a pace of about 129 steps per minute. The lower limit of vigorous-intensity exercise is generally defined as 6.0 METs.įor the participants in the current study, moderate-intensity walking began at about 2.7 miles per hour - or at a pace of about 102 steps per minute. Moderate-intensity activity is generally defined as movement that requires 3.0 METs - or three times the amount of oxygen that a person would consume while sitting still. The researchers counted the participants’ steps and computed the intensity at which they were doing the activity, using something called metabolic equivalents of task, or METs. Study detailsįor the study, Tudor-Locke and her colleagues brought 76 healthy men and women in their 20s and 30s into a lab where they walked on treadmills at various speeds. But it does appear to offer the most rigorous evidence to date in support of that suggestion. This isn’t the first study to propose 100 steps per minute as a reasonable rule-of-thumb measure of moderate-intensity walking.
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That will give you the approximate intensity level of your walking workout. “This research establishes a very practical method to measure the intensity of walking, one that is very easy to communicate and also rigorously validated by the science,” says Catrine Tudor-Locke, the study’s lead author and a kinesiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in a released statement.Īll you have to do is count your steps for 15 seconds and then multiply by four. (Running, which is also vigorous activity, generally begins at around 140 steps per minute.) And upping the pace to 130 steps per minute shifts the intensity to vigorous. It provides new evidence for a simple and reliable way of measuring exercise intensity: counting the cadence of our steps.įor adults aged 21 to 40, walking about 100 steps per minute constitutes moderate intensity, the study found. But what exactly does “moderate” or “vigorous” - or even “brisk” - mean in that context? And how do we know if we’re achieving those levels of intensity when we’re walking - without, that is, having to do all those pulse measurements and math calculations to figure out our “target heart rate”? Counting the stepsĪ study published recently in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity offers some help.