It turns out that your walking pace is related to your health. A study done in New Zealand has shown that how fast a person usually walks can be a sign of how well they’ll age.
The study done in Dunedin, New Zealand has started in 1970 and followed 1000 people through to middle age, has found that those who usually walked at a slow pace of 1.25 meters per second had smaller brain volume, more cortical thinning, smaller cortical areas, and more white matter lesions.
What does all this mean ? Well, according to scientists all these factors are a characteristic of an older brain.
Other scary outcomes for slow walkers included worse cardiorespiratory health, worst immune health, and gum and teeth health than participants who had a faster pace of walking, that is 1.75 meters per second or faster.
At the time when the data was gathered all the participants were 45 years old.
An important question that needs to be asked here is did some participants walk slower because of an already poor health ? If this is the case, then that could possibly explain the poor results on all bio-markets that were tested.
A lead researcher Line J.H. Rasmussen, a post-doctoral researcher in the Duke University department of psychology & neuroscience characterized all the findings as “Really Striking” and said:
“The thing that’s really striking is that this is in 45-year-old people, not the geriatric patients who are usually assessed with such measures.”
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