Walking is sold as a way to lose weight, and on that particular measure it is honestly not very impressive.
It is, however, one of the best-evidenced things you can do for your body and your brain, and the amount required is far smaller than most people assume.
So this is the honest version.
The short answer: Walking a mile costs about 100 calories, which is a biscuit. As a weight tool on its own it is weak, and what you eat decides that question. But the American Heart Association’s threshold for counting as “very active” is the equivalent of twenty-two minutes of walking a day, and at that dose the effects on the brain, the heart and the immune system are large and well documented.
Why Walking Is Weak for Weight Loss
The arithmetic is unforgiving and it is worth seeing plainly.
Walking or running a mile costs roughly 100 calories. That figure barely changes with speed, which surprises people. Running gets you there faster; it does not get you there much cheaper.
An hour of steady walking is therefore somewhere around 200 to 300 calories, which is a large effort against a small number, and it is easily undone by a snack chosen to reward it.
This is why people who take up walking and change nothing else are so often disappointed, and then conclude that their metabolism is broken.
It is not broken. Walking is simply the wrong lever for that particular job. The lever that works is the density of what is on the plate, which is a different article: the four numbers are here.
We had a version of this page that said walking slows your metabolism so you burn fewer calories, which leads to less weight gain. That sentence does not mean anything, and we have removed it.
What Walking Is Genuinely Very Good At
It grows part of your brain
This is not a figure of speech.
The anterior hippocampus, which is central to memory, normally shrinks by 1 to 2 per cent a year as we get older. It is one of the more depressing facts about ageing.
In one trial, 120 older adults were put on a simple walking programme and the researchers tracked the size of it.
It grew.
Swedish researchers following people over years found that physically active people were about 60 per cent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
It changes how often you get ill
People who exercised five or more days a week had up to 46 per cent fewer colds than people who exercised one day a week or less.
That is a large effect for something with no cost and no side effects.
And it does something for the head that is harder to measure
Andy here. The part of walking that I value most is not cardiovascular.
Most of what we reach for when we are tired or bored adds stimulation. A screen, a snack, something loud. Each of those raises the bar that the next thing has to clear, which is why a ten-minute scroll leaves your actual work feeling duller than it did before you started.
Walking goes the other way. It is physical, undemanding and mildly useful, and it lowers the bar rather than raising it. That is why a walk leaves you more able to work afterwards and a break on your phone leaves you less. I wrote about that mechanism at length here, because it turns out to be one of the most common hidden triggers for eating when you are not hungry.
How Much Walking Is Enough?
Less than you think, and the official numbers are worth knowing because they are so much lower than the cultural ones.
- The American Heart Association’s “very active” threshold is the equivalent of about twenty-two minutes of walking a day. Not an hour. Not a gym.
- For intensity, the useful target is 60 to 80 per cent of your maximum heart rate. For a sixty-year-old, 60 per cent is roughly 96 beats a minute, which is a brisk walk rather than a stroll.
- Start at the bottom of that range and move up as it gets easier.
About the ten thousand steps
That number is not a research finding.
It came from the name of a pedometer marketed in Japan in the 1960s, manpo-kei, which translates as ten-thousand-step meter. It was chosen partly because the character for ten thousand looks like a walking figure.
It has since been studied, and the benefits appear well below it and flatten out well before ten thousand. Which is good news if you have been treating it as a pass mark and failing it daily.
How to Actually Fit Walking Into a Day
The thing that works is attaching it to something that already happens, rather than finding a new slot for it.
- Walk to the shop rather than driving. Twenty-two minutes is a return trip to most corner shops.
- Take a call on your feet and outside.
- Get off one stop early.
- Walk after dinner rather than sitting straight down. This is the one we actually do, and it does more for the evening than any rule about not eating after eight.
Bad weather is not the obstacle it looks like. Indoors, up and down stairs, or around a supermarket all count. The body has no opinion about scenery.
The Honest Summary
If you want to change your weight, change what is on the plate. Walking will not do it and will make you hungry.
If you want to protect your brain, your heart and your mood, walk, and twenty-two minutes clears the bar that the American Heart Association set.
Those are two different goals, and most of the disappointment around exercise comes from expecting the second one to deliver the first.
Venny is a medical doctor and a dietitian; Andy is a psychologist. This is general information rather than medical advice. If you have a heart condition, joint problems or have been inactive for a long time, start gently and check with your own doctor first.
And, always, seek health consciously.
