What does your walking pace say about your heart?

Walking is a great exercise for the health of your heart but the pace at which you walk might determine your risk of heart disease.

For this, a study was conducted which examines the link between self-reported pace of walking – slow, steady or brisk – and self-prediction regarding dying from heart disease or cancer in the future.

A team of researchers from the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre, UK analysed data of about 420,727 people from the UK Biobank. The data was collected between 2006 and 2010 and included people who were free of cancer and heart disease at the time of collecting their information.

This means that self-reported walking pace can be used to ascertain the fitness levels of individuals and thus their mortality risk which can help tailor exercise interventions.

After 6.3 years, the researchers found that there were 8598 deaths with the sample population being studied – 1654 from cardiovascular disease and 4850 from cancer.

The researchers found that slow walkers were twice as likely to have a heart-related death compared to brisk walkers. This was seen in both men and women. This could not be explained through related risk factors such as smoking, body mass index, diet or how much television the participants in the sample watched.

This suggests that habitual walking pace is an independent predictor of heart-related death.

The researchers also found that self-reported walking pace was linked to an individual’s objective measure of exercise tolerance indicating that self-reported walking pace is a good indicator of overall physical fitness.

This means that self-reported walking pace can be used to ascertain the fitness levels of individuals and thus their mortality risk which can help tailor exercise interventions.

The researchers also measured hand grip strength as measured by a dynamometer to see if it was a good predictor of heart-related deaths or cancer and found that it was a weak indicator of heart related deaths in men but could not be generalised across the whole population.

There was no association between self-reported walking pace and handgrip strength and cancer-deaths.

If taking a walk is how you exercise, then keep it steady or brisk for maximum benefit to your heath.

Source: European Heart Journal