does walking speed influence your rate of biological ageing
Walking is obviously something anybody can do, whatever age they are, and so it holds a real potential for an intervention. And we’ve actually seen in previous research that there’s strong associations between health status and self-rated walking pace.
Those who say they are fast walkers tend to be healthier and they also have reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality. And other researchers show that brisk walkers live up to 20 years longer than slow walkers. Why is this? Previously, researchers have suggested that walking is actually a complex motor task and in order to be able to walk, you need to have good motor control, you need to have good musculoskeletal health, cardiovascular fitness, and lung capacity. And we know that in older adults, slow walkers have a much higher rate of falls and overall mortality as well as disability in cognitive impairment.
But a new study that’s come out from the UK has shown that it’s not just older adults who need to be aware of their walking speed. In a study from the UK that was released recently, they looked at 405,000 people in a UK Biobank Study. This large study followed a large number of people for a long period of time. They got lots of genetic markers, underwent gene sampling, and they also intermittently assessed all of their health markers. They then looked at the association of walking speed with telomere length.
Paul talks a lot about telomeres. If you think of your DNA, they are wrapped in these little telomeres and they look similar to your laces and the plastic caps at the end of the laces. If you think about your DNAs being the laces, these telomeres are the plastic caps and every time your cells replicate or divide, there’s a little snip that is taken off these telomeres so the telomere becomes shorter. And eventually, those telomeres will become completely worn out and then the cell cannot divide anymore. The cell then becomes what we call senescent. Think of senescent cells a little bit like zombie cells. They’re not active cells but they’re not completely dead, and they are prone to becoming cancerous, so we do not want to have a lot of senescent cells.
Telomere lengths have actually been a measure of people’s biological age, and you can see when people have shorter telomeres, they tend to have aged more biologically and they tend to live shorter lives compared with people who have longer telomeres. In this study they looked at the association of telomere length with walking speed, and it was predictive. Walking speed predicted telomere length, not the other way around.
The participants in this study had an average age of around 56 years old, which is important because they are middle aged and not elderly (a lot of studies about walking speed previously has been done with the elderly). What they found was that walking pace was significantly associated with telomere length, and that those who walk at a brisk pace had significantly longer telomeres than those who walk at an average pace. This study used tracking devices so they could tell the speed of the people when they were walking. They also controlled many variables such as food intake, alcohol intake, smoking status, sleep duration, blood pressure, and cholesterol medication, diabetes medication, and also whether they had cardiovascular diseases or cancer. Even after they adjusted for all of those, they still found a very significant difference between people who walked at an average pace vs those who walked at a brisk pace, with those who walked at a brisk pace having longer telomeres than the people at an average.
Why? Most likely it’s got to do with exercise intensity. So we know that vigorous exercise is more effective for you than moderate exercise, but this even comes down to walking. If you walk at a faster pace, it would seem to have a whole host of extra metabolic benefits compared to walking at a slower pace. Researchers have suggested that this is to do with cardiovascular diseases, that walking at a faster pace increases your cardiovascular fitness, and those with a higher cardiovascular fitness will also walk at a faster pace. So what’s chicken and what’s egg?
The message here seems to be that intensity is really key, even when you’re walking. We know that vigorous exercise, going to the gym, doing high intensity interval training is awesome for you, but the results of this study have shown that at least for those who are middle-aged, just doing a lot of brisk walking can be really beneficial for your health.
It’s important to acknowledge that if you really want to be a peak performer and enhance your life span and health span, that doing more vigorous physical activity, getting out of breath a few times a week, and adding a few strength training sessions a week would help to propel you towards that optimal health. But really, the takeout is that for a base-level of physical health and good biological age, you just need to do lots of walking and you need to do it quickly.
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