"Walking isn't real exercise"

The next belief is that even if you walked, it wouldn't do anything. A stroll to the shop is nothing. Real exercise is a run, a class, a session with a start and a finish and a shower afterwards.

The NHS guidelines for adults are a hundred and fifty minutes of moderate intensity activity a week, or seventy-five of vigorous, and they list brisk walking first among the moderate examples. The NHS walking page says that a brisk ten-minute daily walk has health benefits and counts toward the hundred and fifty. So the official position isn't that walking is a poor relation. It's that walking at three miles an hour is the thing the target was written for. A ten-minute errand walk each way to the shop is twenty minutes of it, and five of those a week is most of the target on their own.

The evidence behind that is worth a paragraph, because it's stronger than most people expect. Paul Kelly and colleagues, in 2014, pooled fourteen studies of walking and mortality, covering about two hundred and eighty thousand people, and adjusted for all the other exercise those people did, so that the result was for walking on its own. At a standard weekly dose, which works out at roughly two to three hours of brisk walking a week by my conversion, regular walkers had an eleven per cent lower risk of dying from any cause over the follow-up. And the shape of the curve mattered. The biggest reduction in risk was in the lowest band of walking, between people who did almost none and people who did a little. The gains flatten as you walk more. They don't need you to walk far.

Steps tell the same story. Pedro Saint-Maurice and colleagues, in 2020, followed nearly five thousand American adults over forty who'd worn a step counter for a week, for about ten years. Compared with people taking four thousand steps a day, people taking eight thousand had about half the risk of dying over the follow-up, and people taking twelve thousand had lower risk again. How fast the steps were taken made no independent difference once the number of steps was accounted for. Four thousand extra steps is about two miles, and two miles is two errand walks.

These are observational studies. People who walk more may differ in other ways, and the researchers adjusted for the ways they could measure, which is never all of them. But the direction is consistent across every study of this kind, and the NHS's position rests on it. Walking is real exercise. It's the real exercise most of the evidence is about. The session with the shower is fine too, and there's a book in this series about it, but it's not what "counts" means.