Why Walking Could Be Your Secret Weapon
Simple, beneficial and highly accessible, does it get any better?
Sammy, Frank and I out for a stroll in the woods. The best kind of light activity.
Do you track your steps? I bet you either do or have been told you should at some point in recent history.
Talk about daily steps and general fitness tracking has exploded over the last few years.
Virtually everyone I know has or has had either a fitbit, an apple watch or some sort of fitness tracker at some point. Full disclosure, I am a fitness coach, so there is obviously some population bias within the people I know.
With that being said, I wanted to write this article to expand on why walking and any form of light activity, truly could be your secret weapon to improving your health. Whether it be from aiding in weight loss or just for general health, the potential benefits seem almost too good for how simple the task at hand truly is.
Historically, exercise has been put up on a pedestal when it comes to weight loss. The fitness industry has largely over valued exercise and undervalued other components of total daily energy expenditure when it comes to weight loss.
One reason is because of personal interest and bias. I am a personal trainer and online coach. When I was only personal training, I put food on the table via PT sessions. Most PT clients in my experience come seeking weight loss. Especially in more commercial and less specialized gyms.
So it is not great for business for fitness industry folks to share the honesty about exercise and it’s relationship with weight loss — that it’s more supplemental than it is needed.
This is also newer in the mainstream. I’m sure researchers always knew this, but the mainstream hadn't started to receieve the memo until more recently. Which is to emphasize that the industry isn’t just malicious and lying. There’s more bias and ignorance than anything from what I see here — and that includes myself.
In case all of your eggs are still in the exercise basket for fat loss, let me expand on what makes up your total daily energy expenditure. Which is your energy out in the calories in vs calories out equation.
TDEE is made up of your basal metabolic rate(BMR), the thermic effect of feeding (TEF), non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) and exercise activity (EA).
Conventional wisdom may have you believing that exercise is the real home run hitter in this equation. When in reality, it’s often the smallest component.
As you’ll see above, this will be a common breakdown of total daily energy expenditure. I adapted this from a paper by Trexler et al. 2014, about metabolic adaptaion.
Your BMR is typically going to take up the most amount of energy expenditure in this equation and by a majority in most cases. The reason being, your body is expensive to keep running. Everything that happens in your body requires energy. This includes all of the energy we need for our organs to fucntion all day and for all the acitivty going on in our body all day that is involuntary. All of that costs energy and we get our energy from the calories we consume in our food.
Similar to how basically everything costs money within a capitalist society. In this analogy, your BMR is kind of like your rent or your mortgage. For most of us, it’s just going to be our biggest expense.
Sure, we can spend a lot of money out at a bar one night, just like we can spend a lot of energy during a single workout, but very rarely will this be more expensive than our mortgage/rent or our BMR to keep the lights on.
Then we have TEF which is the cost is takes to absorb and digest your food. To beat this capitalism analogy into the ground, TEF is kind of like how “you gotta spend money to make money!” Your body has to spend energy to acquire energy. Which is what TEF is.
Then we have NEAT. Which is why I brought up this whole tangent. NEAT is basically all the physical energy you expend in a day that is not intentional exercise. Walking, fidgeting, putting groceries away etc. NEAT is not only the largest component to physical energy expenditure for most of us, it’s also seems to be the most adaptable.
By this I mean it is proposed to be a large reason for metabolic adaptation from weight loss apart from the expected drop in metabolic rate from just losing body mass alone.
As you lose weight, your metabolic rate which often drop. You can typically estimate that accurately based on your body mass change. Except, some studies (cited above) show a much larger drop than would be expected. Indicating metabolic adaptation happening not only from body mass lost, but potentially from your body aiming to conserve more energy. Easiest way to do that is so reduce levels of NEAT, since it’s not as intentional and more subconscious than exercise is.
So NEAT can account for a good amount of energy expenditure and is also quite adaptable. This means it’s likely to drop when you eat less and increase when you eat more.
Finally we have exercise activity, which is said to account for 5–10% for most people and even as a little as 0% if someone does not exercise at all. The reason for this is that yes, even though exercise is expensive, it is short lived and infrequent compared to the other factors. It’s kind of like running the washing machine. Yes, it will cost a lot of energy, but you’re not doing it nearly as long or as often as something such as running water or having the lights on.
Some people will have very high energy outputs from exercise, but it’s quite rare unless you’re an athlete, have to train as your job or spend the bulk of your free time training. Which is rarely the case.
What Does This Have To Do With Walking?
As I mentioned above, since walking is considered NEAT in most cases, it can be used to really bump up your energy expenditure.
You could also train more, yes. But there is one issue with that — the potential for excessive fatigue and energy conservation.
We have all been there where we trained so damn hard that we basically became immobile for the rest of the day or even a day on top of that. Either by mental/physical fatigue or by just sheer soreness.
Regardless, this could result in less total energy out over the long run. Yes, exercise activty would be up, but NEAT might just plummet OR the drive to eat may increase too. Potentially in a way that could offset your expected weight loss from the intense exercise. Which has been seen in exercise research.
One study on sedentary and postmenopausal women explored this through varying degrees of cardio exercise dosage and the actual outcomes compared to expected outcomes. Groups were separted into either expending 4 calories per kg of bodyweight per week (Kcal/kg/wk), 8 Kcal/kg/wk or 12Kcal/kg/wk.
The 4 and 8 kcal groups lost slightly more weight than expected, while the 12 kcal group only lost about half of what was expected even though they put in the most work.
Which lends itself to the idea that excessive training may be a net negative if your goal is weight loss. Due to a potential compensatory response by either reductions in other activity (primarily NEAT) or a larger increase of appetite that could offset calories out by having more calories in (via eating more).
In all honesty, this is pretty intuitive. We’ve probably all been there where we do something just completely exhausting. Then we’re ravenously hungry and or glued to a horizontal position from the fatigue.
If your goal is weight loss or even just better health outcomes, we probably want to avoid these states.
Meaning your training should be hard, but not so hard it has you compensate in ways that negate your actual progress.
The sweet spot would be in a place where you’re training sufficiently hard AND still having the ability to go for some walks, get some light activity and not be so damn hungry that you can’t make goal oriented decisions with your nutrition.
A super basic litmus test could be as follows:
After your training session or within the same day, is the idea of walking to the store or taking a nice stroll plausible WITHOUT having to get amped up for it?
If the answer is no, you may be sacrificing your total energy expenditure for gruelling workouts that may not even be the best way to achieve your results.
Remember, NEAT is more likely to contribute to a higher amount of energy expenditure than exercise will over the course of an entire week.
So if deciding between adding in more exercise than you’re doing or just simply adding more steps or any other form of light activity, I will go against my bias and say just walk more/get more light activity in.
Especially if you’re already training 3–5 times per week. If you’re only training once per week, then I’d probably say get that second workout in first.
Side note, if you’re quite lean and trying to get shredded, this may not be the best advice. In cases like that, extra cardio will probably be more important. This is more so meant for general population people trying to lose weight and improve health.
Secondary Benefits Of Activity
Other than just higher energy expenditure from more walking without accumulating too much fatigue, there are other benefits from increasing your activity in general.
One undervalued one is appetite regulation. It has been shown that very sedentary levels of activity are more associated with disregulated energy intake. Meaning you’re more likely to consume more calories than you need.
This is ofen called the “J shaped curve” of activity and energy intake.
The idea is that very low levels of activity may dysregulate your appetite and drive you to eat more than needed.
As you can see above, the subjects lowest ranking in activity still ate more or around the same as all other groups other than the group with the highest amount of activity.
Many things are at play here, but a dysregulated appetite is what is proposed by the researchers. One thing I will add here, is that there is probably a negative feedback loop going on here. Which I say from experience.
I’ve personally noticed, that when I’m more sedentary, I’m also more bored. Which usually has me looking for food as some form of stimulation. And stimulating food sure as hell ain’t broccoli. Now, if your appetite awareness is dysregulated, you’re bored and you have a history of eating for comfort (I sure do), then you got a perfect recipe for overeating.
I say this because I feel like a lot of us just went through this during the peak of the pandemic. If you went through a full lockdown and we’re home all day, you may have noticed your drive to eat went up even though you were moving less. This combination of a dysregulated appetite with very low activity levels and the amount of stress of being in a pandemic could surely all contribute to a higher drive to eat. Not to mention the opportunity to eat was quite high since you may have always been home and real close to the kitchen. Which just isn’t the case when you’re out and more active.
So if you added in more general activity, especially outdoor light activity (walking being a prime example), you could potentially help improve your appetite signalling, get some damn fresh air, move your body more, reduce your opportunity to eat/emotionally regulate with food and potentially feel a little more stimulation just from getting outside and moving a bit. Which I think we all have experienced how great that feels after being sedentary all day.
Lastly, new evidence has shown that more steps does help reduce all cause mortality risk (death by any cause). A recent meta-analysis showed that this risk reduced by about 12% for every 1000 steps passed 2700 per day and up to 17,000. In this paper, folks who averaged 16,000 steps per day showed about a 66% reduction in all cause mortality risk than folks who averaged 2700 steps per day.
This is not to say that more steps will cause your lifespan to increase. This is correlative. I say this because people often misconstrue data like this. What this does show, is that higher step counts do seem to reduce risk of all cause mortality in a dose-reponse manner. At least for this population — which was people of all sexes, around the ages of mid 50’s to early 70’s in more developed countries (US, Aus, UK, Japan & Norway).
It is very plausible that folks with better health simply walk more. So the walking is more so a side effect of better health and contributing to the positive feedback loop of great health, but this still shows that walking is most likely a good thing to do more of if you can.
One thing I will note, is that this paper above doesn’t mean you should aim for 16,000–17,000 steps per day. In fact, the biggest reductions in risk were seen from 2700 up to 4000 and from 6000 up to 8000. So if anything, if you’re on the lower end of this graph, aim to just add one or two thousand more. You don’t need 16,000 or even 10,000 — which is the number most commonly thrown out. You could just probably benefit from more steps, even if it’s jsut another one or two thousand.
The Key Variables: Communication & Accessibility
Regardless of weight loss, I think we can all agree that those benefits are quite high when considering how accessible the activity truly is. Which is why walking/light activity is so crucial in my opinion. It’s fucking accessible, easy to incorporate and doesn’t have all the barriers that a lot of fitness suggestions do.
A lot of fitness routines out there have plenty of friction to them and are only appropriate for certain populations. I am a coach for example. My in person session rate is anywhere from $100-$120 per hour. My more affordable option is online coaching, which is still $200-$250 per month. Making me fully aware that my services are not that accessible to a lot of people. Gym memberships can also be expensive or not within close proximity to folks who don’t have great transportation. Adding in even more friction.
If money is not an issue, time often is and adding in more gruelling exercise can be a lot more time sucking than just adding in more walking/light activity.
Finally, social constraints also play a role. I’m biased, because I fucking love the gym and fitness. Not everyone does though. Some people would never step foot in a gym. Yet, they are still people who could probably benefit from more physical activity. So if you told them that if they grabbed a coffee and went on a hike with a friend, that they could be getting great health benefits from that, you’d have a big win. Compare that to telling them they have to train hard to get the benefits of activity.
First off, that would be a lie. Secondly, you’d be attempting to shame/fear monger them into exercising more. Which is not a great solution. While you could have helped them find a method of exercise that is still beneficial, but also makes them feel good. Which will keep them coming back and that is the biggest goal — consistency over time.
This is not to say you shouldn’t exercise. You definitely should if you can. But we often overlook the life constraints that a lot of people have when it comes to getting enough exercise in. So if you look at this from a public health perspective, the idea is “what message can we communicate that is the most effective, while being the most accessible and doable”. And I have to think an emphasis on more walking/light activity has to be high on that list.
Telling your grandmother to get into a gym could work. That would be great. But if she had zero interest in it, you could say “hey why don’t you try to go for more walks OR even tend to the garden more often”. In that situation, you may be speaking her language. She may have never thought that gardening could be a beneficial form of activity. Yet, for a 70 year old sedentary woman, I’d say thats probably an awesome activity.
This is why I love more emphasis on walking and light activity. It fills in all the grey between the spectrum of being sedentary and training hard. Magnify that by how it is more accessible than most fitness messaging and has no shortage of other benefits and it seems like a no brainer with plenty of upside.
Summary
I’m going to end this with some bullet points for some clear takeaways that hopefully resonate with you.
-Contrary to what a lot of people still think, exercise does not burn the most amount your daily calories. In fact, often the least
-The most adaptable part of your energy expenditure is most likely your NEAT. Which is all of the physical energy you expend that is not actual exercise (walking, pacing, fidgeting, cooking etc)
-Excessive exercise may in fact reduce NEAT or increase your drive to eat which may offset expected weight loss
-The sweet spot is to train hard, but not so hard that is causes excessive fatiuge and potential energy conservation
-More daily activity can help with appetite regulation.
-More activity can also reduce your opportunity to eat along with helping keep you less bored and maybe less likely to emotionally regulate with food (that is based off of anedcote, not actual data I have)
-More steps per day passed 2700 have shown to decrease all cause mortality risk by around 12% for every 1000 steps up to about 17,000
-You DON’T need to get that many steps. You don’t even need to get 10K steps. This just means you’ll probably benefit from more steps, especially if you’re closer to 2700 .
-I personally love the messaging to walk more/get more light activity in because it is effective but more importantly, accessible to almost everyone.
-It would be amazing if you did train. But if that’s not something you have any interest in, keeping your steps high and trying to get more light activity in will still be very beneficial for you.
-Fuck fitness snobbery, go be active and have some fun with it!
Cheers🍻
-Coach Dylan
References:
1. Metabolic adaptation to weight loss: implications for the athletehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943438/
2. Evidence for the existence of adaptive thermogenesis during weight loss
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11430776/
3. Changes in Weight, Waist Circumference and Compensatory Responses with Different Doses of Exercise among Sedentary, Overweight Postmenopausal Women
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2639700/
4. Low levels of physical activity are associated with dysregulation of energy intake and fat mass gain over 1 year
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4658461/
5. Daily Step Count and All-Cause Mortality: A Dose-Response Meta-analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34417979/