People Who Walk to Work Are Healthier Than Those Who Walk for Leisure

A new study has found that walking with a purpose, such as getting to work or going to the grocery, makes people walk faster and reports themselves to be healthier.

The study also found that people who walk for different reasons reported different levels of self-rated health. For instance, those who walk to places such as the supermarket or their work reported better health than those who walk for leisure.

Different Reasons for Walking Equal Different Levels of Self-Rated Health

According to Gulsah Akar, an associate professor of city and regional planning in the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture, walking for utilitarian purposes dramatically improves the health. These types of walking are easier to incorporate into a person's daily routine.

"So, basically, both as city planners and as people, we should try to take the advantage of this as much as possible," Akar said.

(Photo : Bruno Vincent/Getty Images)
People who walk to work are healthier, study says.

The study was published online earlier this month in the Journal of Transport and Health. It used data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, a U.S. dataset collected from April 2016 to May 2017.

The team of researchers analyzed self-reports of health assessments from 125,885 adults. Those people reported the number of minutes they walk for different purposes, such as home to work, home to shopping, home recreation activities, and those walking trips that did not start from their homes.

Afterward, the participants were asked to rate how healthy they are on a scale of 1 to 5. All in all, the dataset yielded more than 500,000 walking trips from the participants.

Akar and Ohio State doctoral student Gilsu Pae found that the self-rate of being healthy increases no matter how long the walking time and for whatever purpose.

READ: New Study Links Brisk Walking to Longevity

They also found that an additional ten minutes of walking from home to work, like trips from home to the bus stops, increase how a person sees himself as a healthy person by six percent compared to other reasons. Those who walk from home to other destinations reported an increase of 3 percent higher health scores.

Furthermore, the team said that those who walked to work walked faster, on an average of 2.7 miles per hour. Meanwhile, those who walk for leisure, such as an after-dinner stroll, walked an average of 2.55 miles per hour.

The researchers also found that walking trips that started from home are generally longer than those that began elsewhere. About 64 percent of home-based walking trips last for at least ten minutes, while 50 percent of trips that started somewhere else are at least that long.

Adapting Walking to Work in Your Daily Routine

Akar said that she was surprised by the findings for her study on the different purposes of walking and how healthy people believe they were.

She said she initially thought that the difference might not be so significant and that walking for different purposes is generally the same. Although that is somewhat true, her study suggests that some purposes of walking have a significantly higher effect on a person's health than others.

In conclusion, Akar suggests that building activities into parts of a daily routine that are otherwise sedentary could make a person feel healthier. It is an opportunity to put exercise into the daily routines in a natural way.

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