If you were to guess which exercise was better for your health, would you say running - or walking? As they say in all the best parts of the internet, the results of a recent study may surprise you. Prof Niall Moyna from the School of Health and Human Performance at DCU joined the This Week show on RTÉ Radio 1 to talk about the findings. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full above).
The study, says Moyna, looked at all of the studies undertaken over the last 30 years which looked at the impact of walking on your health. "Basically, what they found was that compared to walking 2,000 steps a day, if you increase that to 2,500, you decrease your risk of dying over a six-year period by around 8%. But if you increased it to around 9,000, you decreased it by 60%, and if you doubled that to 16,000 steps, you only got a 4 to 6% benefit so the sweet spot seems to be around 8,000 to 9,000 steps a day."
All of which means you can walk rather than run. "Any form of exercise is good for us", says Moyna. "People like running, but the vast majority of people do not like running. If you want to get the health benefits and you want to get them very quickly, the current guidelines is that we get around 30 minutes of walking a day.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Brendan O'Connor Show, Prof Niall Moyna shares his tips on getting back to exercise
"You get the same benefit from 10 minutes of a jog. You get the same benefits, whether it's walking or jogging, but you have to spend a lot more time walking to get those benefits. Time constraints is a big issue. People in midlife, they can't get that 30 minutes into their day, but you can go out and do your 10 minutes and you get those benefits."
In terms of those benefits, Moyna maintains that "there isn't a single organ system in our bodies that is not positively affected by even a 10-minute walk or a five-minute walk. There's no pharmacological therapy that has that impact on human health.
"It reminds me of a quote from JoAnn Manson, who's a famous physician working out of Harvard and has published over 3,000 research papers in this area. At a conference, she stated that exercise is as close as we have come to a magic bullet in medicine. I mean, that's a profound statement."
From RTÉ Brainstorm, do we really need to walk 10,000 steps a day?
Moyna says the trick when it comes to beating time constraints is to look at your whole day. "You're awake for 16 hours so it could be a little bit in the morning and a little bit in the afternoon. If you can accumulate around 7,000 to 9,000 steps, you're going to get all the attending health benefits. Going beyond that, certainly from a psychological perspective, it really makes you feel good, but you don't really get added health benefits so that's the sweet spot.
"If time is the issue, 10-minute run, 10-minute jog every day, you'll get all the benefits. If not, try and accumulate around 7,000 to 9,000 steps and you get all the benefits."
