This Small Tweak Makes a Huge Difference to Your Daily Walk

If walking is part of your exercise routine, you might want to try stopping to smell the roses once in a while along your route, a new study suggests.

Researchers in Italy found short bursts of walking might actually give your metabolism more of a workout than trekking the same distance without a break.

Walking engages muscles in your arms, chest, back, abdomen, pelvis, and legs, and while it doesn't take much conscious effort to coordinate all this, your brain gets its fair share of exercise on a stroll too.

The classic 10,000 steps-a-day adage has its origins in 1965, when a Japanese company created a step-counting device marketed as Manpo-kei, meaning '10,000 steps meter'.

What started as a somewhat arbitrary – albeit effective – number of steps to aim for has been tested time and time again, with mixed results. But the new research by pathophysiologists at the University of Milan shows that not all steps are created equal.

As first author Francesco Luciano and colleagues explain in their published paper, using steady-state walking to calculate energy consumption "substantially underestimates energy expenditure for short bouts".

This has implications not only for people who are trying to burn off more of their energy, but also for people who might be trying to conserve it.

"Exercise programs based on short walking bouts are used for the treatment and rehabilitation of several clinical conditions, including obesity and stroke," the authors write.

This may also be important information for programs tailored to help prevent people losing weight while still getting the benefits of exercise, like eating disorder treatment programs.

"Understanding the cost of short bouts is crucial for tailoring [exercise programs], especially for people with low aerobic fitness and increased time to reach a metabolic steady state," the team writes.

It's important to note these findings are based on a pretty small sample size of just 10 healthy participants – 5 male, 5 female – all around 27 years of age, so the results may not be representative of a broader population.

Each participant walked on a stair climber for bouts of 10, 30, 60, 90, and 240 seconds, and in a separate experiment, walked those same bouts on a treadmill.

The research team measured how much oxygen participants used, on average, when they were at rest before the experiments, and then again after the bouts of walking.

For the 240-second bouts, they also measured oxygen intake four times during the walk to assess the effects of 'steady state' walking, which is when the metabolism shifts to accommodate a particular kind of movement over a longer period of time.

"Our findings show that the time-averaged oxygen uptake and metabolic cost are greater for shorter than longer bouts," the researchers report.

During 30-second bouts, the participants consumed 20–60 percent more oxygen than the standard estimates for walking exercise, which are based on steady-state (long, continuous) walking, during which the body becomes more efficient.

Oxygen consumption is often used to measure how much energy is being used during exercise, which is why this study suggests that when it comes to calculating the calories burned from walking, the duration of the stroll could make a huge difference.

This research was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.