Walking: It’s in Your Genes! What You Can do to Increase Your Activity Level

Our first pre-human ancestors stood upright and began to walk about 2.5 million years ago. Since then, nature has shaped our bodies to be highly efficient walking creatures.  As humans came to inhabit every corner of our world by walking across, over, and around the earth. 

Only 150 years ago, 90 percent of the world’s population lived out in the natural world or on farms.  Like our ancient forebears, these people walked while they built their homes and cleared their land.  They walked as they planted, tended, and harvested their crops and carried babies and water. They walked and ran as they gathered plants and hunted game.  They spent much of their waking time walking, even when they wanted to socialize with family and friends.

Over the course of just a few generations, an eye blink by evolutionary standards, we have abandoned our legs as our primary means of work, play, and locomotion.  You and I, and all of the people on earth, are designed by nature to walk intermittently throughout the day, and the latest research suggests that we would all be healthier if we still did.

A scientific consensus is building that emphasizes cumulative daily walking.  Studies show that walking during the course of your daily activity can improve your health as well as daily workouts in a fitness facility.  The health benefits associated with walking include lower risks for high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, joint disease, depression, anxiety, and death.  The bottom line is simply that regular walking throughout the day will improve your health. On the flip side, inactivity, or being sedentary, leads to poor health and obesity.  Admittedly, high-intensity, high level exertion provides benefits even above and beyond those noted from just walking.   However, the average American is either not interested in, or not capable, of performing a strenuous, heart-pounding workout that leaves them sweaty and breathless.  On the other hand, a great deal of low intensity physical activity can provide most of the health and mental benefits of a high intensity program, but it requires more of a time commitment.  For example, when you run for 30 minutes at five miles per hour, your blood levels of sugar and triglycerides (fats) fall dramatically during exercise and for about 90 minutes afterwards.   If instead you decide to do a light activity, such as walking, you will experience the same benefits, although you will have to spend much more time at the activity and or do it intermittently throughout the day. 

Walking is an available and accessible form of exercise for almost anyone, and it is much less likely to cause injuries than high intensity exercises.  Nearly all athletes who engage regularly in high-intensity sports at least occasionally experience significant injuries.

 A recent study showed that dog owners who walked their dogs on a daily basis took 10 percent more steps and weighed six pounds less than dog owners who didn’t walk their pets. 

In a hurry?   When the Cardiovascular Consultants cardiologists round on our hospital patients, we make a habit of shunning the elevators and taking the stairs instead.  Often, our entourage of medical students and residents are grumbling under their breath as they trudge behind us.  I tell them, “The stairs are quicker and the short bouts of physical activity we get traipsing up these flights of stairs are likely to be the most challenging exercise we will do today.”