What are the benefits of walking?

Walking is one of the most simple movement based tasks that binds nearly all of us together. It is a major developmental mile stone as a child, and something that we subconsciously do everyday, for the rest of our lives. Often, though, walking is overlooked by therapists in turn of specific exercises, gym memberships or class based activity.

So what are the benefits of walking in comparison to some of these other exercise types, and how can walking best be used to optimise health and activity in different stages of life.

Benefits of walking

As we can see from this infographic walking has many varied positives.

More walking, less hospital

This next paragraph will condense a great article found here.

There was a large population study done in australia in 2005 which looked the data from people aged 55-80 across 10 years. The study aimed to establish the causation between hospital stays and physical activity (walking). The study found

“The inactive people (taking 4,500 steps per day) averaged 0.97 days of hospital care per year. The more active people (taking 8,800 steps per day) needed only 0.68 days of care per year.”

Thats a huge finding, although the numbers 0.97 and 0.68 seem rather abstract to most of us it equates to a huge 30% less hospital stays, which equates to 975,000 beds per year which works out to a whopping 1.7 billion.

So get up and get active, it’ll maybe even reduce your hospital visits!