Walking improves your chances of living longer

You know that walking is good for you, but just how good is it for you? The answer to that is hard to quantify but a large new study from the University of Sydney has gone a way towards doing that by comparing walking to sitting and the results are significant.

The study involved health-related data gathered from more than 200,000 people of middle-age or older taking part in the “45 and up” study over a four-year period. By analysing the data, the researchers hoped to see how replacing one hour of sitting a day with an hour of walking would impact health. After all, we know that walking is good for you and we also know that sitting is bad for you.

Replacing one hour of sitting with one hour of walking or some other physical activity a day is enough to reduce your risk of early death by between 12 and 14 per cent.

The analysis showed that replacing one hour of sitting with one hour of walking or some other physical activity a day is enough to reduce your risk of early death by between 12 and 14 per cent. Additionally, replacing one hour of sitting with one hour of sleep in people who were sleep deficient led to a six per cent decrease in early death risk. By contrast, if one hour of daily walking or other exercise was replaced by one hour of sitting or other sedentary behaviour, then there was an increase in early death risk of between 13 and 17 per cent.

Clearly the message is that, in simple terms: movement good, no movement bad. Keeping moving is fundamental to being healthy and living long and well. That should be enough to make you sit up (or preferably stand up) and take notice.