Even Short Walks Can Meaningfully Extend Lifespan if You Pick Up the Pace

You may not need to focus solely on racking up thousands and thousands of steps a day to get meaningful health benefits from walking. You might just aim to amp up your speed.

Experts say the findings may be especially encouraging if you’re not very active now, suggesting there’s some flexibility to tailor daily movement to fit your lifestyle.

“If you’re among the least active, the biggest bang for your buck comes from walking your existing steps a little faster and working up toward a few thousand more,” says Amanda Paluch, PhD, associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who was not involved in the study. “This shows that you don’t need to overhaul your routine to get a real benefit.”

Faster, Quicker Walks and Slower, Longer Walks Were Both Linked to a Lower Risk of Early Death

For the study, researchers analyzed movement data from more than 100,000 adults in the UK Biobank cohort who wore wrist activity trackers for seven consecutive days between 2013 and 2015, and tracked deaths for about eight years.

They grouped participants by daily step count and measured their peak 30-minute cadence, or average steps per minute during the 30 highest-cadence minutes of each day. Those minutes didn’t have to be consecutive.

Both walking faster and taking more daily steps were associated with a lower risk of death, with the biggest potential benefit from pace appearing among people taking the fewest steps.

Here’s how the data breaks down:

Is the Bottom Line, ‘Walk Faster, Always’?

“If you can’t rack up steps, pace matters,” says study coauthor Borja del Pozo Cruz, PhD, associate professor at Universidad Europa in Madrid. “So someone with a 15-minute lunch walk isn’t out of options: Walking briskly during that window may do more for them than the same duration at a stroll.”

Still, the results don’t mean that everyone should simply pick up the speed.

“The story isn’t ‘walk faster, always,’” Dr. Paluch says. “It’s that cadence matters most when you’re doing very little, and once you’re accumulating a solid volume of steps, how fast you take them becomes secondary.”

“It suggests intensity is doing a lot of the ‘work’ for people who are otherwise quite sedentary,” Dr. Ahmadi says.

Why Walking Faster — or Walking More — May Help You Live Longer

“We rely on the totality of evidence for scientific knowledge, and not on a single study,” says I-Min Lee, MBBS, ScD, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, who was not involved in the study. “While this study showed that fewer faster steps were associated with comparable benefits as more steps at a slower pace, other studies have not supported this.”

Cardiorespiratory fitness is also one of the mechanisms that could help explain the findings, as the same walking pace may represent a greater relative effort for someone who is less active compared with someone who is already fit. But the scientists behind the new walking study didn’t actually measure fitness, making it difficult to reach conclusions based on their research.

The Study Has Some Important Limitations

One strength of the study is that the researchers objectively measured movement with wearable devices rather than relying on participants to report their activity.

But because it was observational, the study can’t prove that walking faster or taking more steps caused people to live longer, but simply that there was an link.

The researchers tried to reduce reverse causation — the possibility that poorer health caused people to walk less or more slowly — by excluding people with prior cardiovascular disease or cancer and deaths within the first two years of follow-up. But it can’t be completely ruled out.

A person’s ability to walk quickly may also be a sign of better underlying health. “People who move well are able to walk faster, and they’re also less likely to die early for reasons that may have nothing to do with the walking itself,” Paluch says.

In addition, activity was measured for only seven days, which may not reflect overall habits. Wrist trackers can also occasionally miss steps when the wrist isn’t moving, like when someone is pushing a shopping cart, Ahmadi notes.

Should You Walk Faster or Take More Steps?

For most people, the findings shouldn’t translate into obsessively counting steps per minute.

“Don’t overthink the cadence number,” Paluch says. “Ninety to 100 steps per minute is roughly what a brisk walk feels like.”

And those faster steps don’t necessarily have to happen during one continuous walk. The findings are consistent with accumulating short bursts of movement throughout the day, Ahmadi says — such as walking briskly to the bus, taking the stairs, or picking up the pace between errands.

Rather than viewing 10,000 steps as a set threshold, the broader takeaway is that people have options.

“There’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach to lower mortality risk through walking,” Ahmadi says. “Someone can choose a higher number of steps at a comfortable pace, or fewer steps more briskly, and both are legitimate, evidence-based paths. That’s particularly encouraging for people who face real barriers to walking a lot, such as having limited time availability.”

Lee cautions against interpreting 90 to 100 steps per minute as an established recommendation, though. Research on step intensity is relatively new, she says, and there isn’t yet an accepted standard measure — so the broader evidence on physical activity is much clearer than the evidence on the ideal combination of pace and steps.

“I think focusing on walking more, or walking faster, or both are all good options,” Lee says. “One should do what one is capable of, and will do consistently.”