Walking with purpose vs. a stroll
Study finds trips to a destination more healthful than recreational walks
During the pandemic many people started walking as both a form of exercise and as something safe to do while isolating. Now, new research has found that walking with a purpose is better for you than walking for leisure.
Published in the Journal of Transport and Health, the study found that people walking to work or the grocery store reported significantly better health than people who were out for a casual stroll.
Walking with a purpose, or utilitarian walking, is walking to get to a destination.
“People generally make more walking trips for utilitarian purposes and these trips are likely to have higher speeds, while recreational walking trips are typically longer in duration,” said Gulsah Akar, associate professor of city and regional planning in Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture.
The study used data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey. Researchers analyzed self-reported health assessments from 125,885 adults ages 18 to 64 who reported the number of minutes they spent walking for different purposes – from home to work, from home to shopping, from home to recreation activities and walking trips that did not start at their homes.
The researchers, Akar and Ohio State doctoral student Gilsu Pae, found that walking for any duration, for any purpose, increased how healthy a person felt.
“We were excited to find significant associations between walking trips and health outcomes,” Akar said. “We find that the benefits of walking mainly come from home-based walking trips. This suggests planners and decision makers should consider diverse interventions to encourage people to walk within, to and from their neighborhoods.”
To put this research to use, cities could build sidewalks and rest areas for commute and recreational walking trips, which tend to be longer in distance as well as duration, Akar said.
“They can encourage mixed-use development patterns where residents can reach various destinations within short distances and integrate walking in their daily routines,” he said.
It was surprising to see that walking trips with different purposes had different effects on adults’ self-assessed health scores, Akar said.
“For instance, an additional 10 minutes of walking for home-based work trips increases the odds of being in a higher health outcome category by 6%, while this effect is smaller for homebased other trips (3%),” he said. “Further analysis revealed walking trips with different trip purposes have distinct speeds and durations. Walking for home-based work trips has the fastest speed, followed by walking for home-based recreational trips. These speak to the intensity of physical activity.”
Even people who work from home and are isolating can benefit from the research.
“We suggest staying active. Walk around the block, or better yet, ‘walk to work’ every morning,” Akar said. “Instead of commuting from one room to another in your house, take a detour. Just get out and walk in your neighborhood as if you are commuting to work, then come back home and start your work in your office space.”
While walking be sure to keep safety in mind. Avoid dangerous environments, such as heavy-traffic areas without safe facilities such as sidewalks and crossings, high crime-rate areas and frozen sidewalks in winter, Akar said.
“By the way, while longer durations bring more benefits, the overall health benefits still accumulate if the intermittent bouts of walking are at least 10 minutes,” he said. “If you can walk more than 10 minutes every day, you can accumulate miles for your health.”