Walking with a purpose — especially walking to get to work — makes people walk faster and perceive themselves as healthier, a new study finds. The study found that walking produced different levels of self-assessment for a variety of reasons. For example, people who mainly walked from their home to work and the supermarket reported better health than people who mainly walked for leisure.
“We found that walking for utilitarian purposes significantly improves your health, and that these types of walks are easier to incorporate into your daily routine,” said Gulsah Akar, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture.
“So basically we should try to take advantage of this as much as possible.”
The study used data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, a U.S. dataset collected from April 2016 to May 2017. The researchers analyzed self-reported health assessments of 125,885 adults ages 18 to 64. Those adults reported the number of minutes they had walked for different purposes:from home to work, from home to shopping, from home to recreation, and hiking trips that did not start at their home.
And survey respondents ranked how healthy they were on a scale of 1 to 5. The dataset the researchers analyzed included more than 500,000 trips. The researchers – doctoral student Gilsu Pae of Akar and Ohio State – found that walking for any length of time, for any purpose, improves a person's health.
But they also found that an extra 10 minutes of walking per trip from home for work-related travel — for example, from someone's home to the bus stop 10 minutes away — increased the likelihood of a higher health score by 6 percent, compared to people who walk for other reasons. People who walked away from home for reasons unrelated to work, shopping or recreation were 3 percent more likely to have a higher health score.
And, the researchers found, people who walked for work walked faster — about 4.5 km per hour on average — than people who walked for other reasons. People who walked for recreational purposes – for example a walk after dinner – walked an average of about 4 km per hour.
The researchers also found that hikes that start at home tend to be longer than hikes that start elsewhere. The team found that 64 percent of hikes home are at least 10 minutes in length, while 50 percent of hikes starting elsewhere are at least that long.
Akar said the findings suggest that building activity in parts of a day that are otherwise sedentary — for example, walking rather than commuting by car — can make one feel healthier.
"That means going to a gym or a recreation center aren't the only ways to exercise," Akar said. “It's an opportunity to put active minutes into our daily schedules in an easy way.”
