People ask me all the time all the time: “Is walking exercise?” In fact, this debate has gotten quite heated lately on social media — ranging from doctors on famous podcasts saying “don’t be silly walking isn’t exercise” and influencers screaming “people who say walking isn’t exercise are f*cking idiots.”
As I’ve watched this back and forth on the topic rage on, I get why this is still confusing for people. Gosh, even the “experts” can’t seem to agree.
Here’s the thing — absolute statements are very common on social media because they draw attention and get likes and comments so people keep using them.
But the problem is that these types of black and white statements completely lack context and individual nuance so they end up being unhelpful to the general population who just genuinely want to know if walking is enough for them to get the health and fitness benefits they are after.
So let’s talk about it.
Is Walking Exercise?
As with most things, it depends. In this case, it first depends on how you define “exercise”.
Merriam-Webster defines exercise as a “bodily exertion for the sake of developing and maintaining physical fitness.”
A 1985 Public Health Reports paper proposed the following definitions:
- “Physical activity is defined as any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that results in energy expenditure.”
- “Exercise is a subset of physical activity that is planned, structured, and repetitive and has as a final or an intermediate objective the improvement or maintenance of physical fitness.”
So yes, walking absolutely can be classified as exercise if you are using it to develop, improve, or maintain your physical fitness. This particularly applies to people who are otherwise sedentary or are just beginning their fitness journey.
However, two caveats here:
- If you are otherwise active and fit, walking alone may not be enough to develop, improve, or maintain your physical fitness. Once your fitness reaches a certain threshold, your baseline minimum for what’s needed to improve or maintain your fitness level will be higher and a leisurely stroll around your neighborhood might not provide a strong enough stimulus.
- Depending on what your goals are, walking alone may not be enough physical activity or exercise to reach your goals. For example, we know that walking alone isn’t enough to combat bone density loss as we age.
Again, we need more context — not more click bait statements. So let’s go deeper.
Does Your Walking Routine Fit Into the Physical Activity Guidelines?
When people ask me if walking counts as exercise, often what they really want to know is “does walking count toward the minimum exercise recommendations?”
In other words, they are wondering “is walking cardio or strength training?”
So let’s look at those.
How much physical activity is recommended?
In terms of cardiovascular exercise, according to the current guidelines published by the Department of Health and Human Services, adults should aim for:
- At least 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity, or
- At least 75 minutes per week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, or
- An equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity aerobic activity throughout the week.
In addition to the aerobic exercise above, adults should also do muscle-strengthening activities of moderate or greater intensity using resistance or weights involving all major muscle groups at least two days per week.
Is your walking routine enough to fulfill the strength training guidelines?
First, walking would not count toward the muscle-strengthening activity requirement unless you were completely sedentary. Since most of us are carrying our bodyweight around all day, it’s doubtful that walking would be enough total body stimulus to be strengthening our muscles and bones.
Additionally, the key to muscle and bone strengthening is progressive overload, meaning that your body adapts to certain loads and activities so overtime you need to increase the stimulus to create additional strengthening. That means that very quickly your body would need more load than its own weight to gain strength.
Walking in and of itself is considered a weight-bearing exercise. Strength training exercises by definition are exercises that make your muscles and bones stronger. So in the beginning, walking can be enough stimulus to make your bones and muscles stronger but those benefits quickly plateau. In order to keep getting stronger, your muscles and bones need more stimulus — what we call progressive overload in exercise physiology.
Research shows that the muscle-building benefits really come when we work our muscles to fatigue — meaning you can’t lift another 1-2 repetitions. It’s certainly possible to do that with bodyweight exercises like walking and unweighted squats but, as you get stronger, it’s going to take a lot of repetitions and who’s got the time for that?
Is your walking routine enough to fulfill the cardiovascular fitness guidelines?
Walking may qualify as cardiovascular exercise … if the intensity is high enough to meet the guidelines. As noted above, physical activities done at a moderate or vigorous intensity count toward meeting the cardiovascular guidelines.
Brisk walking typically falls into this category. This is important because a certain intensity is required in order to get the full heart health benefits like managing risks for heart disease, high blood pressure, and for blood glucose regulation and diabetes mellitus risk reduction.
Activity intensity matters for heart disease prevention
Intensity is a measure of how hard your body works during aerobic activity. There are several ways to measure intensity of activity and the two most common are (1) by your perceived exertion and (2) by heart rate.
Let’s start by breaking down these two categories of cardiovascular exercise intensity in terms of perceived exertion.
- Moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity means you’re working hard enough to breathe harder, raise your heart rate, and break a light sweat. On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the level of effort required for sitting on the couch and 10 is all-out effort, moderate-intensity activity is about a 5 or 6. Examples of moderate-intensity activities:
- Brisk walking (2.5 miles per hour or faster)
- Recreational swimming
- Bicycling slower than 10 miles per hour on level terrain
- Vigorous-intensity aerobic activity means you’re breathing hard and fast, and your heart rate is higher than with moderate activity. You won’t be able to say more than a few words without pausing for a breath. On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the level of effort required for sitting on the couch and 10 is all-out effort, vigorous-intensity activity is about a 7 or 8. Examples of vigorous-intensity activities:
- Jogging or running
- Swimming laps
- Vigorous dancing
- Bicycling faster than 10 miles per hour
- Jumping rope
Find your target heart rate zone
Now, let’s break it down in terms of heart rate.
The American Heart Association generally recommends these heart rate targets:
- Moderate exercise intensity: 50% to about 70% of your maximum heart rate.
- Vigorous exercise intensity: 70% to about 85% of your maximum heart rate.
But I prefer the heart rate reserve (HRR) method for determining target heart rate zones because it takes into account your resting heart rate and therefore is more tailored to you.
- Multiply your age by 0.7 and subtract the total from 208 to get your maximum heart rate.
- Determine your resting heart rate by taking your pulse when you first wake up in the morning to see how many times your heart beats each minute when you are completely at rest.
- Calculate your heart rate reserve (HRR) by subtracting your resting heart rate from your maximum heart rate.
- Multiply your HRR by your desired percentage of exercise intensity. Then, add your resting heart rate to get your target heart rate for that specific exercise intensity.
For example, a 50-year-old woman has a resting heart rate of 70. She wants to exercise at moderate intensity, so that’s the 50% to 70% zone. The HRR formula for her looks like this:
- 208 – (50 x 0.7) = 173 (maximum heart rate)
- 173 – 70 (resting heart rate) = 103 (heart rate reserve)
- (103 × 50%) + 70 = 121 (minimum heart rate for target zone)
- (103 × 70%) + 70 = 142 (maximum heart rate for target zone)
- Her average heart rate during moderate-intensity exercise should be between 121-142.
Is walking alone enough for cardiovascular fitness?
Well, it certainly can be — if you are hitting the moderate- or vigorous-intensity targets above. Walking briskly for some of us may be intense enough to be in that 50% threshold, but we’re not talking about a casual stroll to get us there.
Yes, for some beginners or previously-sedentary people, walking absolutely can be a moderate-intensity activity. But over time, and with repetition you’ll get fitter and your average heart rate will come down and you’ll then need to work harder to get your heart rate into that target heart rate zone. This is a good thing. It shows that your heart and blood vessels are getting better at moving blood and oxygen through your system. It means your cardiovascular system is getting better at handling stress. You are becoming more resilient. That’s the whole point of cardiovascular training — a certain level of stress gets easier to handle.
But for someone like me who either runs and lifts heavy weights most days of the week, my morning 3-4 mile dog walk nets an average heart rate of 82-87 beats per minute — well below the 50% minimum heart rate target for moderate-intensity activity.
If I walked hillier route and made my dogs walk faster, I might be able to get my heart rate up to a level that qualifies as moderate-intensity but I won’t do that because my dogs are very sniffy and all that mental stimulation of exploring the world around them with their nose is critical for them to be happy so no flipping way am I going to drag them along and yank their leashes every time they stop to sniff just so I can get my heart rate up!
It’s All About Context
My point is, it all comes down to where you start and what health benefits you’re looking to gain.
If heart health is a concern or if improving yours is a goal for you, make sure you’re working your heart enough to create change. I’ve worked with clients who are only walking and they wonder why their heart health numbers and key cardiovascular disease markers aren’t improving. Then I look at their heart rate and it’s because they aren’t stressing the system enough to keep making gains.
Additionally, if bone health and bone density are key concerns for you, walking is a good start but it’s not enough on its own to prevent bone loss as you age. If that’s you, listen to this podcast episode.
Higher Intensity Has Its Own Specific Benefits
The scientific research also points to a growing number of special benefits of including short but higher intensity work (like interval training) 1-2 times per week, specifically as it relates to managing anxiety and metabolic health.
Additionally, we now have data that higher intensity training can help preserve muscle, power output, and body composition for women while aging and through menopause.
Ideally, for maximum cardiovascular fitness improvements, we’d do a mix of low, moderate, and vigorous activity.
Exercise or Not, the Benefits of Walking Are Huge
So, walking is a physical activity than can qualify as exercise and help you achieve health benefits. And we have data to support that even light-intensity activity — like your casual mental health walk — has numerous mental health benefits. It can improve sleep quality, improve blood sugar regulation, help manage blood pressure, help you maintain a healthy body weight, and reduce all cause mortality (aka your risk for early death).
The point of this post isn’t to say walking is bad or worthless, walking regularly helps with all sorts of things. But for it to meet the exercise guidelines and prevent cardiovascular disease, you would need to be doing it in a way that makes it intense enough to develop, improve, or maintain your cardio fitness.
Look, movement throughout the day in all forms has benefits. Cleaning the house, raking the yard, dancing around the kitchen while you make pancakes on a Tuesday night — all good! Movement doesn’t need to be “exercise” to be helpful. We need BOTH.
The Bottom Line
If you’re just starting out on your fitness journey, start by walking. That’s perfect! Someday your fitness will improve to a point where you have to increase your walking speed or add incline to get your heart rate up high enough to keep getting cardiovascular benefits. At some point, your walks may stop being cardio and start being movement instead — for which there are still tons of benefits.
If people would walk more, we’d all be better off in terms of physical and mental health. But the guidelines are clear so I think it’s irresponsible to tell people that casual-paced leisure walking is the same or a replacement for moderate- or vigorous-intensity cardio.
Again, context matters.
Walking isn’t going to fix everything but a daily walk can be a key component in a healthy lifestyle.
Where do you fall in this great walking debate? —Alison
___________________________________________
Alison Heilig is the Editor-in-Chief at FBG and Head Hypewoman at Miles To Go Athletics. She divides her time between running, lifting, hiking with her dogs, snuggling with her dogs, and supporting strong women in the world (and coaching up those who aspire to be). You can find and connect with her on IG @itsalisonheilig