To be healthy, the Ministry of Sports recommends doing at least the equivalent of 30 minutes of brisk walking (which significantly increases your heart rate), at least five days a week.
Vary step length for better metabolic expenditure
But are all ways of walking equal? No, according to a new study published in the journal bioRxiv. For better metabolic expenditure, varying the pace would be more effective than the number of steps.
“We hypothesize that more frequent and larger variations in step length increase your metabolic expenditure during walking”, says Adam Grimmitt, one of the authors, at DailyMail. And if metabolic expenditure increases, so does that of calories.
To achieve these results, scientists followed the walking of 18 healthy adults. The latter were, on average, 24 years old and weighed 70.5 kg. They gave them two tests.
In a first experiment, participants had to walk normally – at a constant pace – for five minutes on a treadmill. The average stride was 1.2 meters per second.
In a second experiment, the participants still walked on a mat but the researchers illuminated the steps they had to take in order to change the length of their steps. Compared to the average stride, the positions varied by 5 to 10%, more or less. During this test, the walkers were fitted with a mouthpiece that measured their rate of carbon dioxide production.
The result: for every 1% increase in step variability, there was a 0.7% increase in energy used. Having uneven strides therefore allows greater metabolic expenditure.
“According to our data, a 2.7% increase in step length variability would increase metabolic expenditure by 1.7%.explain the authors. Step length variability plays a modest, but significant, role in the metabolic expenditure of walking.”
Walk or exercise several times a week
The researchers nevertheless recognize that their work is more difficult to apply in daily life because it is difficult to have such precision in terms of gait variation.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), from 18 years old, adults “should engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity endurance activity or at least 75 minutes of sustained-intensity endurance activity per week, or an equivalent combination of moderate-intensity activity and supported.”
In these minutes, you can incorporate a whole bunch of moments: sport of course, but also leisure activities, household chores or even trips, as long as they are done by bike or on foot!
