Longevity Bloomington Newsletter #34 - Walking: A Great Start, But Not Enough
The Missing Pieces in Your Fitness Routine
Walking: A Great Start, But Not Enough
Walking is one of the most accessible and beneficial forms of physical activity. It supports heart health, and can boost mood and energy.
But while walking is a great foundation for staying active, it isn’t the full picture when it comes to long-term health, strength, and mobility. Far too many adults over 50 rely on walking alone to meet their fitness needs.
In this month’s newsletter, we’ll explore why walking is valuable and how to make it even more effective. We will also discuss where walking falls short, and what else you can do to stay strong, balanced, and independent for years to come.
The Benefits of Walking
The benefits of walking are numerous. Walking can improve your endurance, cardiovascular health, and blood sugar control. If you are completely sedentary, walking can also improve your strength (for a while). Although there are better ways to improve your overall health, walking is much better than sitting on the couch.
Beyond the physical benefits of walking, it can also have positive effects on your mental well being. Walking has been shown to reduce your risk of depression, improve mood, and boost creative output. Walking is also associated with improved sleep quality and duration.
Walking 5 days per week for at least 30 minutes per day is an excellent goal. This amount of walking has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of chronic, age-related diseases. If you track your daily steps, aiming for 8,000-10,000 steps per day is a good place to start and has been shown to improve health outcomes.
How to Get More Out of Your Walks
When you initially start walking regularly, your body responds by building endurance, improving cardiovascular health, and strengthening muscles. This is because walking is a new physical challenge that prompts your body to adapt and get stronger.
However, after weeks or months of doing the same walking routine, your body becomes efficient at handling that activity. This means the initial benefits begin to plateau because your muscles, heart, and lungs no longer feel challenged enough to improve further.
Think of it like this: If you always walk the same route at the same pace, your body “gets used to it.” The walk that once felt like good exercise becomes more of a warm-up. Without increasing the speed, duration, or adding variety, your endurance and fitness gains level off.
To keep progressing, you need to introduce new challenges, such as:
Walking faster or adding intervals of brisk walking
Adding hills or inclines to your route
Using a weighted backpack for extra resistance
By varying your routine and increasing the demands on your body, you encourage continued improvement. This will help you build more stamina and overall fitness.
Where Walking Falls Short
While walking is a great place to start, it doesn't address many essential aspects of a well-rounded fitness routine. Here are important areas walking misses.
Strength
To build strength, your muscles need to be challenged beyond what they handle in everyday activities. This usually requires some form of external resistance such as dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, or even bodyweight exercises performed with intention. The key is progressive loading: gradually increasing the demand on your muscles over time. While walking may offer a small strength boost for beginners, it quickly plateaus and doesn't provide enough resistance to promote continued strength gains.
Balance
Unless you are walking on varied terrain in a dynamic environment, walking will not significantly improve your balance. The sidewalk in your neighborhood just isn’t enough challenge to your body’s balance systems to significantly improve your stability.
As we have discussed in a previous newsletter on balance, the most effective interventions to reduce your risk of an injurious fall is a combination of exercise and vision assessment/treatment. This combination reduced the risk of an injurious fall by 83%!
Two broad categories of exercise are most effective in improving balance: resistance training and balance exercises. Unfortunately, you won’t get either one of these while walking.
A 2017 review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reviewed the current evidence on the effectiveness of exercise to prevent falls. From the author:
“There is strong evidence that appropriately designed intervention programmes can prevent falls.
This systematic review with meta-analysis provides strong evidence that exercise as a single intervention prevents falls in people living in the community. The meta-regression suggests programmes that involve a high challenge to balance and include more than 3 hours/week of exercise have greater fall prevention effects.”
Bone Density
Bones behave similar to muscles. For a particular exercise to cause your bones to get stronger, the mechanical load applied to the bones must exceed the load encountered during daily activities. This is why every major clinical practice guideline recommends resistance training to improve bone density. Exercises that do not put much force through the bones (like walking) will not provide the same benefit as exercises that put higher force through the bones.
Resistance training may be the most important lifestyle change people can make to improve their bone health. When an individual is lifting weights, the muscles and tendons apply tension (force) to the bones. This increase in tension stimulates the bone cells to remodel and produce more bone tissue. As a result, the bones become stronger and more dense.
From the authors:
“Walking as a singular exercise therapy has no significant effects on bone density at the lumbar spine, at the radius, or for the whole body in perimenopausal and postmenopausal women.”
Flexibility
In order to improve your flexibility, you must move your joints (and muscles) through their full range of motion. When you walk, your hips, knees, and ankles move through a relatively small and repetitive range. This motion doesn’t challenge or improve flexibility in a meaningful way . This is especially true in areas that tend to tighten with age, like the hamstrings, hip flexors, calves, and shoulders.
To improve flexibility, you need more than just walking. You need to move your muscles and joints in ways that stretch and lengthen them. That means performing stretches that target tight areas like your hips, hamstrings, calves, and shoulders. Adding movements like yoga, dynamic stretches, or mobility exercises a few times a week can help you stay limber, and move more comfortably in daily life.
Power
Muscle strength is how much force you can generate; power is how fast you can use it. Strength = horsepower. Power = acceleration. It is becoming increasingly clear in the research that power is vital for aging well.
As we age, muscle power declines about 3% per year—faster than strength. This decline reduces your ability to quickly activate your muscles, which is crucial for everyday tasks like standing from a chair, climbing stairs, recovering from a stumble, or navigating uneven ground.
Walking won’t improve your power because it’s low-intensity, low-speed, and doesn’t challenge your muscles to react quickly or forcefully. To build power, you need exercises that push your muscles to work faster and harder. See our newsletter about power for more ideas.
Progressive Cardiovascular Demand
Walking can benefit your heart, but how much it helps depends on how hard you're working. The benefits of exercise are “intensity-dependent”. This means that, within reason, the results you get from exercise, largely depend on how hard you're working.
This landmark study of 122,000 patients looked at the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and long-term mortality. What did they find? When compared to the individuals with the lowest fitness levels, the folks with the highest fitness levels exhibited an 80% reduction in mortality risk!
A slow, casual stroll is better than sitting on the couch, but it may not raise your heart rate enough to significantly improve cardiovascular fitness. To get more heart-health benefits, you need to walk briskly enough to feel slightly out of breath. Think of a pace where you can still talk, but not sing. This is called moderate-intensity exercise, and it’s where real cardiovascular improvements start to kick in. As discussed above, adding short bursts of faster walking or hills can push you into vigorous intensity, which can boost your heart, lungs, and endurance even more. Of course, jogging, cycling, and swimming are great options as well.
Keep Walking. Just Don’t Stop There
If you are currently walking for exercise, celebrate that you're moving. That’s more than many can say. But if you want to stay strong, independent, and vibrant as you age, walking alone isn’t enough. Use it as your foundation, and start building on it with strength, power, flexibility, and balance work to truly support your long-term health. If you want to age well, you need more than just steps.
Member Spotlight - Annamaria Mecca & Richard Durisen
How long have you been a member of Longevity?
A: 6 months
R: 6 months
Where are you from originally? Where did you go to school?
A: Originally from Buffalo, NY. I did my undergraduate work at SUNY Buffalo and my graduate work at IU.
R: I have blue-collar NYC roots. I was born in Brooklyn, lived in Queens, went to high school in Manhattan (Regis H.S., Dr. Fauci’s Alma Mater), college in the Bronx (Fordham University), and graduate school in New Jersey (Princeton University). I moved to California for two postdoctoral jobs (U.C. Santa Cruz and NASA-Ames Research Center, Mountain View).
What brought you to Bloomington if you are not from the area originally?
A: I originally came here randomly with a friend after we closed our eyes and pointed to a map and we hit Indiana. We were in college so we looked up where the largest university was in Indiana and moved here.
R: I came to IU Bloomington in 1976 to be a Professor of Astronomy and, apart from a few sabbaticals and summers, have lived here ever since. I retired in 2010.
What do you do for work? If retired, what did you do for work?
A: I am a retired Speech Pathologist. I was a Clinical Faculty member in the Dept of Speech and Hearing Sciences at IU. I also had several other jobs in the county.
R: I retired from IUB’s Department of Astronomy in 2010, after 34 years. My research was mostly in computational astrophysics. Recently, I am probably best known for work on planet formation in gas disks around young stars and the erosion of Saturn’s rings by meteoroids.
If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?
R: Santa Fe N.M. style chile rellenos with hot green sauce plus rice and beans and a side of blue corn tortilla chips and salsa.
What is your favorite hobby?
R: It’s more of an avocation than a hobby. I retired as soon as I could from the IU faculty in order to do creative writing. Some of my published poetry and speculative (scifi, fantasy, horror) stories are posted on my writing website durisen.com. I have recently finished a science fiction novel called From the Shadows of the Landscape and am working toward self-publishing it.
What’s something about you that not many people know?
A:I played 6 varsity sports in high school and graduated the year before Title 9 became effective, so my scholarships were academic (not athletic) when I went to college.
R: I had a main belt asteroid named for me (Asteroid 5567 Durisen) by a senior colleague in my department who had naming rights for dozens of asteroids. It is the largest member of a family of asteroids (27 known members) with similar orbits (called the Durisen Family).
What do you like to do when you’re not working out at Longevity?
R: In addition to writing, I like to walk, hike, travel, water the garden, and spend time with family and friends.
What’s the next place on your travel bucket list?
A: Paris
R: Paris, and I’d like to get back to Ireland too.
Favorite restaurant in Bloomington?
A: Uptown (I was a waitress at the original Uptown in the 70’s when it was a small diner next door to the Bluebird).
R: The Uptown, Turkuaz, Vivencia, and Osteria Rago.
Favorite place you have ever been?
A: New Zealand
R: The Santa Cruz Mountains and Wengen, Switzerland.
Another incredible quote from
:“The cost of training is far less than the cost of watching your capabilities erode. The truth is, doing nothing is far riskier than pushing yourself, even just a little. You don’t have to chase personal records or grind through pain. However, you do have to move, challenge your muscles, and protect the abilities that would otherwise be lost. Strength, balance, mobility—they're all perishable. If you don’t actively work to preserve them, you will lose them. The real danger isn’t in trying and adapting—it’s in waiting until it’s too late.”
Well Attended
We would like to recognize the Longevity Bloomington members who made it to > 75% of the classes since our most recent newsletter!
New Members
Welcome to Longevity Bloomington! It has been great having you all in class.