Walk the dog; it’s good for both of you

Walking a dog can be fine exercise. But many people do not have access to a dog, and many of those who do choose not to walk them.

Two small new studies may offer novel ways to promote dog walking and its myriad benefits, even to people without dogs. But the results also indicate that there can be substantial barriers to using a pet to improve your health.

Anyone who owns a dog knows that most of them yearn to go on walks, whatever the time or weather. If I skip our morning jog, my dogs flop onto the floor, disconsolate and reproachful.

The walk would be good for all of us. According to recent studies, adults who often walk a dog are more likely than those who do not to meet the standard exercise recommendation of about 150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity. Well-exercised dogs also tend to be leaner and better behaved than sedentary canines.

But nearly 40 percent of dog owners almost never walk their dogs, other studies show.

Concerned by that statistic, Katie Becofsky, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and dog owner, began to wonder recently whether it might be possible and worthwhile to essentially trick people into walking their dogs more often.

So for one of the new studies, which was presented in June at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in Minneapolis, she and her colleagues invited a group of about 30 local dog owners who reported rarely walking their dogs to join a special dog obedience class.

The owners were told that the program was designed to improve their dogs’ behavior while leashed, but the surreptitious goal was to see if the classes could also increase the owners’ dog walking and physical activity after the instruction had ended.

To that end, half of the group began six weeks of instruction while others were wait-listed as a control group. The participants attended classes with their dogs several times a week, kept a log about extracurricular dog walks and wore an activity monitor, ostensibly to record those walks. The researchers asked them to continue to record any walks and wear the activity monitor occasionally for an additional six weeks after the classes ended.

The logs and monitors showed that people in the class did start to walk their dogs for a few minutes more each week than the control group, both during and after the six weeks of classes. Surprisingly, though, those minutes did not increase the owners’ overall weekly exercise totals.

Becofsky might have been disappointed with the results, she said, but suspects that one factor was that the program collided with a particularly intractable East Coast obstacle: the weather. The study took place during a prolonged period of rain and cold she said.