Older adults who walked at faster speeds tended to have higher levels of daily physical activity.
Physical activity energy expenditure dropped by nearly 17% over four years among study participants.
Walking speed may be a useful indicator of physical function, but changes in walking speed alone don’t tell the whole story.
Walking is one of the most common forms of physical activity among older adults, making walking ability an important part of staying independent and managing everyday activities. But physical activity tends to decline with age, particularly among adults in their 70s and beyond.
A new study from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland looked at whether an older adult’s preferred walking speed was connected to how physically active they were in their everyday lives.
“Participants with faster walking speeds were, on average, more physically active in their daily lives than those who walked more slowly,” researcher Joona Neuvonen said in a news release.
“Walking speed measured under laboratory conditions may not fully reflect everyday mobility, as environmental barriers and opportunities influence movement in different ways.”
How researchers studied walking and activity
The study used data from the AGNES study, which followed community-dwelling adults who were initially 75, 80 or 85 years old. Researchers ultimately analyzed data from 299 participants who had valid physical activity measurements at both the beginning and end of the four-year follow-up.
Participants completed a six-minute walking test in a laboratory, walking at their usual, comfortable pace along a 20-meter corridor. Researchers calculated each person’s preferred walking speed based on the distance they covered.
The researchers also measured participants’ physical activity in their everyday lives using wearable technology. Participants wore a thigh-mounted movement sensor along with a heart-rate monitor. Combining those measurements allowed researchers to estimate physical activity energy expenditure, including activities that may involve relatively little movement but still require physical effort, such as lifting or carrying objects.
What the results could mean for older adults
Over the four-year study period, participants’ physical activity energy expenditure decreased by an average of 16.9 kilojoules per kilogram per day, or about 17%. Kilojoules are a unit of energy, similar to calories. The researchers used kilojoules per kilogram of body weight per day to estimate how much energy participants used through physical activity.
The study also revealed that faster preferred walking speeds were associated with greater daily physical activity.
Specifically, every one-kilometer-per-hour increase in preferred walking speed was associated with 4.7 additional kilojoules per kilogram per day of physical activity energy expenditure.
However, there was limited evidence that an individual’s change in walking speed directly corresponded with their change in physical activity over those four years. In other words, walking speed appears to be closely related to activity levels, but a change in one doesn’t necessarily predict a change in the other.
For consumers, the findings suggest that walking speed can be a useful piece of information when considering physical function in older age. But it shouldn’t be viewed as a standalone measure of how active someone is.