Walk this way for a healthy heart, says study

Still, it’s not the first study to find that a faster walking pace brings more health benefits. A 2023 international study found that walking faster was associated with a lower risk of death, and a 2022 U.K. study found evidence that keeping a brisker pace could lower one’s risk of dementia. A 2022 Brazil-based study, meanwhile, found that the more daily steps taken—and the quicker they are—the less likely someone was to suffer from stiffened arteries. 

But this latest study focused on heart rhythm abnormalities—called arrhythmias—which, the authors note, are common. According to the Mayo Clinic, such abnormalities are grouped into two categories: tachycardia (faster heartbeats) and bradycardia (slow heartbeats). And the most common type is atrial fibrillation—a rapid, chaotic heartbeat—which has doubled in prevalence over the past three decades to nearly 60 million cases worldwide as of 2019, the authors write.

All are associated with heightened risks of cardiovascular disease, sudden cardiac death, and disability, and finding modifiable risk factors is essential, they add.

To examine the potential impact of different walking speeds on arrhythmias, researchers accounted for cardiovascular risk factors such as age, sex, obesity, smoking, alcohol intake, and pre-existing long term conditions. They drew on walking speed data of 420,925 U.K. Biobank survey participants, average age 55, for which the amount of time spent walking at different paces (derived from activity tracker readings) was available.

Researchers defined a slow pace as less than 3 miles an hour; steady/average pace as 3 to 4 miles per hour; and a brisk pace more than 4 miles per hour.

Overall, 27,877 participants (just over 6.5%) reported a slow walking pace; 221,664 (53%) an average walking pace; and 171,384 (41%) a brisk walking pace. 

And during an average monitoring period of 13 years, 36,574 (9%) of participants developed cardiac arrhythmias, while 23,526 had atrial fibrillation, 19,093 had other cardiac arrhythmias, 5,678 had an abnormally slow heart rate, and 2,168 had ventricular arrhythmias (originating in the heart’s lower chambers). 

Participants with a faster walking pace were more likely to be men, live in less deprived areas, and have healthier lifestyles. 

The findings of the study, said Pell, are “biologically plausible,” given that cumulative epidemiological studies have shown that walking pace “is inversely associated with metabolic factors, such as obesity, HbA1c [fasting glucose], diabetes, and [high blood pressure] which, in turn, are associated with the risk of arrhythmias.”