From time to time, I publish an article that is not directly related to Athletics but still concerns physical activity. This time, I was intrigued by a striking title: “How we walk might reveal our risk of death”. The piece was written in a popular-journalism style, yet it referenced a scientific publication from a research team at the University of Leicester, published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. I decided to dig deeper and tracked down the original paper.
This led me into the field of risk prediction, an area of research that is clearly flourishing. Insurance companies rely on precise risk assessment for their business survival, and life insurance is crucial for both insurer and insured. Many risk scores already exist, usually combining nonmodifiable factors (such as age, sex, or chronic disease history) with modifiable ones like blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking habits, and obesity. In recent years, researchers have shown growing interest in using simple physical behaviours as indicators of mortality risk. For example, resting heart rate has proved a convenient proxy for both physical fitness and a lower risk of death.
The University of Leicester team sought to determine whether measures of physical behaviour, such as leisure-time activity and sleep duration, and indicators of physical function and fitness, including resting heart rate and walking pace, could enhance or even replace traditional risk factors in predicting mortality. They analysed data from half a million individuals, divided into four groups: healthy women, unhealthy women, healthy men, and unhealthy men.
I will not go into all the details of their study. (If you are truly interested, I suggest you look it up and read it here: https://www.mcpiqojournal.org/article/S2542-4548(26)00017-2/fulltext). I will not go into all the details of their study but will focus instead on two graphics that I found particularly striking.
The first concerns resting heart rate: the horizontal axis represents the heart rate in beats per minute, and the vertical axis the associated risk factor. It is remarkable that, at least for men, the correlation is almost perfect—notice the very small error bars.
The second graphic deals with walking pace—the paper’s main focus. Unfortunately, because walking speed was self‑reported, only three data points are available: brisk, steady, and slow pace.
Still, the effect is clearly visible. A brisk walking pace is associated with a notably reduced risk, whereas a slow pace corresponds to an increased one.
What is particularly noteworthy is that considering physical behaviour and fitness led to equally consistent conclusions for individuals with existing health conditions. Traditional risk scores, which rely mainly on non-modifiable factors or markers managed through medication, offer little incentive for behavioural change. The Leicester team’s study showed that adding measures of physical behaviour and fitness can significantly improve risk prediction—and among all predictors, walking pace proved the strongest, especially for those with a prevalent health condition.
These findings align with earlier work by the same researchers, who demonstrated that while increasing total exercise lowers the risk of heart attack, reaching the same total through higher intensity brings substantial additional benefit. To make this even more explicit: adding just ten minutes of brisk walking to the daily routine of inactive men and women aged 60 and above was linked to an increase of roughly one year in life expectancy.
So don’t hesitate—get out there and walk. Briskly!
PS I apologise for the somewhat prolonged silence but as you can gather from the photo below I was otherwise occupied recently.
Add to this the fact that the championship was taking place in Egypt, which is a great place for tourism, and you can understand why writing had to take a brief back seat.
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