Walking as Exercise

I began researching this topic with the assumptions that walking must be good for your health, that walking in nature is better than walking in a city or indoors, that it helps with weight loss, and that it should be done frequently. I believe you probably have similar assumptions. If you came here for a quick answer, here it is... Yes, walking is good for both mental and physical health. Taking more steps is better than taking fewer. In terms of physical health, it is comparable to other forms of moderate-intensity exercise. In terms of mental health, walking appears to offer some benefits that other forms of exercise do not, especially when done in nature. It is not a perfect tool for weight loss, but it helps. In the rest of this article, I will discuss specific studies and what I learned about walking.

Why walking matters is the most important question. In the sections that follow, I will explain why it matters for different aspects of health, but there is also a simple truth. Covering long distances is what we evolved to do as a species. We spent most of our existence constantly on the move, living in hunter-gatherer communities without permanent settlements. The human species is estimated to be between 200,000 and 300,000 years old, while agricultural villages first appeared only around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Based on observations of present-day hunter-gatherer societies and archaeological findings, we estimate that for much of history men walked between 15,000 and 18,000 steps per day. By comparison, according to various measurements, the average European today takes slightly more than 5,500 steps per day. A good illustration of how long-distance walking is our superpower compared with our closest primate relatives can be seen in this image. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that we did not simply receive this superpower; we paid dearly for it. Narrower hips make it easier to cover long distances while walking upright, but they also dramatically increase the risks of childbirth for both mother and child. This ability was therefore paid for with the lives of a great many of our ancestors.

Walking as Exercise

Calling walking a form of exercise may sound strange to some people. When exercise is mentioned, most of my patients assume that we are talking about hours of sweating in a gym. While gyms have their advantages, there is no reason for them to be the first, let alone the default, exercise option. The concept of the modern gym emerged within the last fifty years, while we know that people have been exercising for thousands of years. In short, the gym is not the only form of exercise: but does walking count as exercise?

To answer that question, we first need to distinguish between physical exertion (physical activity required to perform a task) and exercise (time deliberately devoted to physical activity with the aim of improving health or strength). Viewed this way, walking fits more naturally under physical exertion, especially for people in the past who had no other way to get around. Modern life, however, has reduced the number of steps we take while performing other tasks so drastically that we now have to deliberately set aside time to reach a certain number of steps: in other words, to exercise. Today, everyone from health organizations to smartwatch apps agrees that walking counts as exercise, specifically as moderate-intensity exercise.

Of course, the effectiveness of this exercise varies depending on a person's lifestyle. A professional footballer trying to increase muscle mass is unlikely to achieve much by adding an hour of walking each day. For someone who spends the entire day sitting, however, that same hour could dramatically improve overall health and quality of life. As I read the research, I repeatedly found that walking produced the greatest health benefits for people with obesity and for those in middle and older age: in other words, the groups with the lowest levels of physical activity. Nevertheless, introducing regular walks provides some benefits even for people who are already highly physically active.

Globally, insufficient physical activity is defined as less than 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week, which includes walking. It is estimated that 31.3% of people do not meet this minimum, meaning that almost one third of the entire adult population is not sufficiently active. Since reliable data show that this percentage has only increased over the past twenty years, many scientists see walking as a possible way out of this problem. The reasons for recommending walking rather than another form of exercise are obvious. Walking is already one of the most common forms of moderate-intensity activity. It is easy to begin, requires no specialized equipment, can be started at any time, can be done alone or with others, and requires no prior fitness. In practical terms, you do not need anyone or anything to start walking, which removes all the convenient excuses for why I did not start exercising last Monday and probably will not start this Monday either.

Despite the obvious potential of recommending walking for health, clear guidelines from official organizations still do not exist. A large number of studies on the effects of walking have been published over the years, but few have examined the influence of the walking environment: urban, natural, or indoor; or other factors such as duration, pace, step count, and frequency. For example, the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans contain no precise recommendations due to insufficient evidence. Nor do the 2020 WHO guidelines on physical activity. The most popular recommendation for decades has been 10,000 steps per day, but as you will see in the next section, it did not originate in medicine or science. In recent years, however, larger and more rigorous studies have offered concrete guidance for setting daily or weekly step goals. These studies also identify specific benefits for different aspects of health.

10,000 Steps

For many years, 10,000 steps per day has been a popular goal. Numerous studies have examined the subject and confirmed that this target can be effective. One small study examined the effects of taking 10,000 steps per day for twelve weeks and found improvements in virtually every easily measurable physical parameter, including body weight, circumferences, BMI, and body fat percentage. The researchers also monitored psychological measures and mood. They concluded that the routine reduced anxiety, depression, anger, and confusion while improving overall mood. But why exactly 10,000: why not more or fewer?

The greatest comedian of all time, George Carlin, spoke about the number ten in his performance Complaints & Grievances (2001): Why ten? Why not nine or eleven? I'll tell you why ten. Ten sounds official. Ten sounds important. If they said eleven, people would not take them seriously... ten is a marketing decision. And indeed, 10,000 steps was a marketing decision.

The trend began in Japan in the 1960s, around the time of the Tokyo Olympic Games. A Japanese company that manufactured step counters attempted to capitalize on the popularity of the Olympics. It developed what was then a new technology, a pedometer, and called it the Manpo-kei, which can be translated as 10,000-step meter. At the time, no research showed that this was the number of steps people needed or that it had any special significance. In the years that followed, however, various research groups repeatedly demonstrated that taking 10,000 steps was better than taking the average of four or five thousand. Advocates and sellers of the practice used these findings, and a scientifically supported global trend was born.

Today's most popular daily step recommendation therefore originated around sixty years ago, when a Japanese company selling pedometers arbitrarily selected a number that sounded appealing. Something similar happened with the now highly popular practice of autophagy, or 16:8 intermittent fasting. People follow the rule strictly without knowing that the only reason the feeding window lasts eight hours rather than seven or nine is that the scientists conducting the original experiment worked eight-hour shifts and fed the rats when they arrived at and left work. This is an entirely different subject, which you can read more about in my article on fasting, but it illustrates the same problem in interpreting scientific evidence as the practice of taking 10,000 steps per day.

The main problems with the statement Walk a certain number of steps and you will be healthier are whether fewer steps could provide the same benefits and whether taking more steps could increase those benefits. In addition, “you will be healthier” tells us nothing about what walking specifically helps with, where the advantages and limitations of this type of exercise lie, or who benefits from it more and who benefits less.

Physical Health

We all know that increasing any form of physical activity is beneficial to health. Here, I will discuss how and to what extent walking affects individual aspects of physical health. A more interesting and reliable measure than any individual health parameter, however, is all-cause mortality. Unlike other parameters that require measurements and equipment, this outcome simply records whether a participant is alive after a certain period. Its reliability increases as the number of participants grows.

An excellent meta-analysis that I will draw on repeatedly examined the relationship between step count and all-cause mortality in more than 150,000 people. The researchers found a strong association between taking more steps and a lower risk of death from any cause. More specifically, they showed that increasing step count reduced risk, but not at a constant rate. Increasing the daily average to around 5,400 steps produced substantial benefits; further increases were still beneficial, but less so. This leads to the first recommendation: aim for around 5,500 steps per day. It is important to note that any increase in movement matters greatly up to this point. In other words, 3,000 steps per day is much better than 1,000, while increasing from 7,000 to 10,000 still helps, but to a lesser extent.

Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD)

A brief introduction to why cardiovascular diseases matter: according to WHO data, cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death and account for around 32% of deaths worldwide. The positive news is that most CVD can be prevented through changes in habits or the environment. Factors that affect CVD include tobacco use, diet, obesity, physical activity, and alcohol consumption, as well as air pollution and how quickly the problem is detected.

The same study examined CVD by monitoring two outcomes: how step count affects the risk of developing CVD and how it affects the risk of dying from CVD. The conclusions were based on a sample of more than 110,000 people, which gives them a high degree of reliability.

Increasing step count reduced the risk of developing CVD, with substantial benefits up to an average of 7,802 steps per day. Further increases continued to reduce risk, but less than increases up to around 7,800 steps. Interestingly, the reduction in risk achieved by moving from zero to 2,000 steps was similar to that achieved by moving from 2,000 to 8,000. The basic recommendation, therefore, is to move at least a little. By examining individual groups within this very large sample, the researchers concluded that older adults gained most of the benefits from increasing their step count earlier than younger and middle-aged adults. Older people achieved most of the benefit by increasing their average to around 5,386 steps per day. Additional steps could still help, but the added benefit became progressively smaller.

Increasing step count produced an even more substantial reduction in the risk of death from CVD. In other words, people who walked more were somewhat less likely to develop CVD, but much less likely to die from it. The most substantial reduction in risk occurred up to 5,422 steps per day.

Cancer

Cancer is responsible for one in six deaths worldwide. Unlike CVD, cancer generally cannot be prevented through changes in behavior or the environment, but it is estimated that around one quarter of cancer deaths could be prevented through changes in tobacco and alcohol use, diet and body weight, or physical activity.

Data from more than 100,000 people provide a fuller picture of how walking affects this disease. The researchers examined how increasing step count affected the risk of developing cancer and the risk of dying from it. The effect on the risk of developing cancer was relatively small and inversely linear. This means that each increase in step count produced a similar reduction in risk, but that overall risk depended more heavily on other factors. The risk of death from cancer, however, changed much more substantially as step count increased. As with the previous conditions, the researchers calculated an average threshold of around 4,800 steps per day, up to which walking had a large effect on risk. Beyond that point, risk continued to decline with additional steps, but more slowly.

In short, walking slightly reduces the risk of developing cancer, but it increases the chances of surviving cancer much more substantially. This certainly does not mean that people diagnosed with cancer should suddenly start walking extensively. It means that regular walking is beneficial because, even if we find ourselves in such a situation, our chances of getting through it are better. Prevention, not treatment. This resembles what we experienced during the COVID pandemic: practically everyone had a chance of becoming ill, but how well we coped with the disease depended greatly on our lifestyle beforehand, while changes made during the illness had much less influence.

Type 2 Diabetes

The percentage of people living with diabetes increases every year. A good diet, physical activity, and maintaining a healthy body weight can help prevent the onset and progression of the disease. I write about this condition repeatedly because it falls within the field of nutrition in which I work. If you would like to read more, two useful articles are Insulin Resistance and Sugars in the Diet.

Regarding the relationship between walking and type 2 diabetes, data from more than 50,000 people showed an inverse linear association. Increasing step count steadily reduced the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. A smaller study attempted to express this reduction in concrete numbers and concluded that every additional 2,000 daily steps reduced the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by around 5.5%, up to at least 10,000 steps and perhaps beyond. For diabetes risk, then, the conclusion is relatively simple: more steps generally means better.

Physical Function

The relationship between walking and physical function is generally discussed in the context of older adults. Walking is a simple activity that carries no serious risk of injury, while its intensity can easily be adjusted through pace and duration. This makes it an ideal form of exercise for older people.

One relatively small study found what we might expect. Older people who took around 7,000 steps per day showed improved leg function and were more likely to maintain or improve that function over time.

A somewhat larger study of older adults examined the association between daily step count and the preservation of physical function and mobility. Around 6,000 steps per day proved to be a reliable threshold separating people with a higher risk of developing mobility problems from those with a lower risk. The researchers also calculated that the risk of developing mobility problems fell by 16% to 18% for every additional 1,000 steps.

Mental Health

Although the effects of walking on physical health were similar to those of other forms of exercise, I expected walking: an activity that has been a regular part of our long history: to offer some specific mental health benefits. To find out whether these expectations were justified, I looked for and read studies examining the effects of walking on individual aspects of mental health, which I discuss in the rest of this section.

Unlike physical parameters, which can be measured relatively easily, psychological parameters are much more complicated because they largely rely on personal feelings, emotions, and sensations. For this reason, research on how something affects mental health often focuses on conditions such as dementia and depression.

Dementia

Dementia is the seventh leading cause of death and one of the most common causes of disability and dependency among older people. By following almost 80,000 people, one study found a strong association between walking and dementia. Its findings suggest that 9,800 steps per day may be optimal for reducing the risk of developing dementia. The researchers set 3,800 steps per day as a minimum and estimated that reaching it reduced dementia risk by around 25%.

Depression

Depression and anxiety are the most common mental health conditions and significantly affect quality of life. Treatment may include medication, psychotherapy, and physical activity. The prevalence of depression is around 5%, but it is estimated that 33.7% of people experience depression at some point in their lives. I expected depression to be the area in which walking would have the greatest effect, particularly compared with other forms of exercise and activity.

Research has shown an inverse linear association between depression risk and daily step count. The risk falls by around 5% for every additional 1,000 steps per day. This was what I expected, but I wanted more detail, so I continued researching. I found two papers (1 and 2) showing that practically all forms of walking can effectively reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety, and that these effects are comparable to those of an active control. Since an active control refers to a group whose members perform another comparable physical activity instead of walking, the conclusion is that walking helps with depression to the same or a similar extent as any other form of exercise requiring similar effort. At this point, I realized that most studies tracked few parameters other than step count: for example, they did not account for pace, company, or, most importantly, the environment. It seems logical that walking in green natural surroundings and with other people would be more beneficial for depression than walking alone indoors, so I continued digging.

The Importance of Walking in Nature

The first paper I found, published in 2019, examined the specific difference between exercising indoors and in nature. It found that people viewed individual exercise sessions in nature more positively and enjoyed them more. However, the researchers found no significant differences in emotions, perceived exertion, exercise intensity, or physiological and biological markers. Their conclusion was: There are indications that physical activity in nature is more pleasant and that people enjoy it more, but there is currently insufficient high-quality evidence to conclude that it provides greater health or psychological benefits than the same activity performed indoors. From this, we can conclude that there are no major physiological differences, but the study's treatment of the psychological dimension was imprecise at best. I therefore tried to find additional studies conducted in psychology rather than using the medical and biochemical approaches considered so far.

A recent comprehensive study from 2026 used a highly reliable data-analysis method and several of the latest studies from 2024 and 2025. It included 809 participants and concluded that exercising in nature produces large and significant improvements in mental health. Indoor exercise also produced positive results, but they were considerably smaller than those achieved by exercising in nature. The study concluded that exercise in nature is clearly the best approach to improving mental health compared with indoor exercise or no intervention. The authors also recommend including exercise in nature in future individual treatment plans and public health strategies. (Another meta-analysis reached similar conclusions, so I will not discuss it separately, but the link is there if you are interested.)

One recent small study monitored the psychological and physical responses of 25 men before and after an hour of brisk walking in one of three environments: natural, urban, or indoor. The study is much broader and more interesting than I can cover here, but you can follow the link if you want to explore it. The researchers demonstrated the importance of the environment in shaping participants' physical and psychological responses. Walking in nature contributed to faster recovery, greater enjoyment, and a stronger intention to repeat the activity. Participants also reported more positive emotions, fewer negative emotions, and better relaxation in natural surroundings. The researchers concluded that the natural environment made a substantial contribution to psychological well-being and physical recovery.

Sleep

Finally, as part of the discussion of mental health, here is a little about the relationship between walking and sleep. As someone who walks before bed almost every evening, I can only say from personal experience that it works for me and that I genuinely have not had sleep problems for years. On the other hand, that is only my experience, and I wanted to find at least one serious study on the subject so that I could present a broader picture.

An excellent paper I found included more than 1,700 participants and examined the effects of walking on subjective sleep quality. It showed that walking significantly improves subjective sleep quality. Interestingly, the effect was greater among people who had poorer sleep quality at the beginning of the study. In other words, walking helped more when people had more serious problems. The authors concluded that walking three to five times per week for 30 to 60 minutes over a period of 12 to 24 weeks can significantly improve sleep quality, especially in people who already have sleep problems.

Weight Loss

Because I have devoted my life to the problem of obesity, I have to say a little about the effects of walking on weight loss. In short, the effect of walking is similar to that of other moderate-intensity activities, so I want to state immediately that walking is a relatively poor tool for losing weight. Since we spent much of our history walking, we had to adapt to do it extremely efficiently and without expending too much energy. This was excellent for the survival of our ancestors, but it does not suit us at all when our goal is efficient weight loss. On the other hand, walking repeatedly proves to be one of the easier forms of exercise to sustain over the long term. My experience suggests that the main problem for people with obesity is usually not that their workouts are insufficiently intense or ineffective for weight loss, but that they do not exercise regularly: or at all. Although walking is not a perfect weight-loss tool in terms of energy expenditure, it may therefore be an excellent way to begin exercising and establish consistency.

Researchers have pointed to a strong association between walking and obesity for years. Even before reviewing the evidence, I believed that this relationship was caused not only by walking itself, but by the broader lifestyle surrounding it. I would expect the average person who walks regularly to eat somewhat better, smoke and drink less, and generally live a healthier life than the average person who walks only when necessary.

While looking for evidence that would confirm or challenge my view, I found a fantastic study. The researchers followed almost 5,000 people and a wide range of medical and non-medical parameters over fifteen years. They found long-term associations between walking and body weight, including less weight gain and a greater likelihood of losing weight over the years.

Most interestingly, the researchers accounted for other physical activities, caloric intake, and numerous additional factors in their statistical analysis. The results showed that walking was associated with less weight gain over the years, particularly among people who had a higher body weight at the start of the study. One specific example involved middle-aged women in the highest quarter of body weight among all the women studied. For them, around four hours of walking per week resulted in approximately 0.5 kg less weight gain per year, or about 8 kg over fifteen years.

They also showed that walking had less influence among people who engaged in more of other forms of physical activity. In other words, if you already exercise, walking contributes less as an additional activity in the context of weight loss. This study did not compare walking with other activities, however; it examined only the relationship between walking and obesity.

Another interesting study I would mention included far fewer people: 82: but monitored them much more precisely. It examined the effect of walking on weight maintenance after a highly restrictive diet in middle-aged women with obesity. Following an initial three-month diet program, during which the women lost an average of 13.1 kg, they entered a nine-month maintenance program. During maintenance, the women were divided into three groups: Control, Walkers 1, and Walkers 2. The Control group made no changes to the amount they walked, Walkers 1 added two to three hours of walking per week, and Walkers 2 added four to six hours per week.

The researchers logically expected Walkers 2 to be more successful at maintaining their weight than Walkers 1, because they had been assigned twice as much additional energy expenditure. That did not happen. At the end of the maintenance program, one year after the study began, the Control group had regained an average of 2 kg, while both walking groups showed slight additional weight loss: 0.6 and 0.7 kg respectively, or 2.6 and 2.7 kg less than the Control group. This demonstrated that walking can be an effective way to maintain body weight after rapid weight loss, but the story does not end there...

One year later, two years after the study began, the researchers carried out another assessment. The data now revealed the greatest problem with practically every weight-loss program. Participants who initially lost an average of 13.1 kg had regained an average of 5.9 to 9.6 kg less than two years later. More interestingly, the difference in regained weight was not significant between the Control group and Walkers 2, who had been assigned an additional four to six hours of walking per week during maintenance. The women in Walkers 1, who had been assigned two to three hours per week, regained 3.5 kg less than the control group, but this was still a small difference. By the end of the study, step counts were similar across all three groups, which tells us the most important part of the story. It is not enough for a type of exercise to work; what matters much more is the motivation to make long-term, and often lifelong, changes to one's lifestyle.

Conclusion

Even a modest increase in step count benefits both physical and mental health. Increasing daily steps to around 8,000 was associated with a substantial reduction in the risk of developing practically all common diseases and of dying from them. Walking is an effective form of exercise for alleviating and preventing common mental health problems, particularly when it takes place in nature.

For most parameters, walking offers benefits similar to those of other forms of exercise, but in some areas it also provides specific advantages, particularly when enjoyment and other subjective experiences are considered. For certain outcomes, walking in nature is substantially better than walking or performing another form of exercise indoors.

Although walking is not a particularly efficient way to lose weight, it is certainly a good first step for people who are not sufficiently active. The effort required to move from zero to one is much greater than the effort needed to move from one to two. However, if a person does nothing beyond moderate walking, continued progress or further improvements in fitness should not be expected. Although the type of exercise matters, the motivation to make long-term: or lifelong: lifestyle changes matters more if meaningful changes in body weight are to be achieved. Because walking requires no preparation, equipment, trainer, specialized space, or anything similar, it removes the additional barriers that often serve as excuses for postponing other forms of exercise.

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it. Enjoy your walk.

Aragonski Dušan