There’s a news article about the health benefits of walking that seems to be everywhere. Have you seen it? Walking for exercise, the article suggests, brings so many good returns that everyone should be doing it.
The information comes from research that charted the daily activity of several hundred people. They counted their steps, the amount of time they spent walking, the pace they walked, and how often they wandered away on their own two feet. The scientists then scrambled all the data together with who was still around at the end of the study and what their quality of life seemed to be.
Based on their new insights, the researchers recommended that for optimal health, everyone who can should walk at a ‘moderate’ pace for 30-40 minutes several times a week. Is that what I do? I have no idea, but I love quantifying things like this. Normally, I just get a nice feeling out of my walking. Today, I would be testing science.
I re-read the article, grabbed my step counter and a stop watch and went out the door for my usual walk. I didn’t worry much about the details, since I walk nearly every day at a good pace for a distance I know is plenty. Certainly, after so many years of strolling for pleasure, I have managed to step into some level of good health. When I return home today, I will not only feel refreshed, but will have some research-based information as to why walking always makes me so content.
The stop watch timed the work-out. My step-counter counted steps. I walked at my usual pace. The article said to stop either at the 10-second mark, or at the 6-second mark and multiply the number of steps by 6 or ten. Remembering the numbers wasn’t difficult, but remembering which numbers to multiply was. Instead, I decided to walk for 30 seconds and multiply the steps by two – easier and maybe even more accurate.
10, 6, 15 steps, 30 seconds, 2. How many steps to make that moderate-level benchmark? I think that the pace was about 3 miles per hour. 30-2-40-10-6-15-3. All these numbers were important, but I had to keep in mind the most important of all – 200 steps per minute is what I remembered reading. Add that to the list of numbers I needed to keep in mind.
But I wasn’t anywhere near that mark, even with my most indulgent computing, which I know was flawed in my favor (18 steps in 10 seconds multiplied by ten doesn’t equal a minute, does it? Or was it 10 steps in 18 seconds?) I continued on my work-out walk a bit perplexed that my usual pace wasn’t adding up to what I’d thought it might.
How could I be so wrong about an activity that I’d invested so many hours doing? I began my walk smug that this outing, at least, would give a pat on my back for all the time I spent getting there. Self-congratulations isn’t always admirable, but we all need a little self-care every now and again, don’t we? I needed this affirmation that walking gives me healthy benefits.
My math was wrong. My counting was wrong. The stopwatch distracted me. But it turns out that none of that mattered, because my recollection of the facts was most wrong of all. When I got back to the house and re-re-read the article, it told me exactly what was my biggest mistake. Turns out that a moderate walking work-out is 100, not 200, steps a minute.
And that wasn’t the only very, very important item in the research article that I got wrong. The most important piece of the research? The fact that all this moderate-level walking gave people in the research group better memory and less dementia.
Maybe walking for simple pleasure, in my case, is enough.
Susan Vasquez 