Men's Health November 4, 2025 0 Comments

Unlock the Hidden Power of Walking: The Game-Changing Tips That Will Transform Your Sole Workout Forever

Ever feel like your day is a whirlwind and the gym is this mythical place you just can’t seem to make it to? Same here. But hey, what if I told you that just slipping in a few walks can actually make a huge splash for your health? I know, it sounds almost too simple—like, shouldn’t you be hitting those 10,000 steps or more? Well, turns out, it’s not about the number of steps but the way you walk them. Intrigued? A fresh study is flipping the script on our daily step obsession and showing us that how long you walk at a stretch matters way more than obsessively counting each step. So, before you lace up and chase down those step goals, let’s dig into why a solid, continuous 15-minute walk might just be your new heart’s best friend—and might even trump pounding pavement all day in short bursts. Ready to rethink your stride? LEARN MORE

IF YOU’RE SHORT on time and can’t regularly make it to the gym, walking is a great way to squeeze in some movement. And finding ways to get some steps in can make a big difference to your health.

It might feel a little on the nose that the more you walk, the better. It’s what fitness trackers are trying to promote with 10,000 step challenges and daily movement goals. But the good news is you don’t need to hit 10,000 steps a day to get the heart pumping and get results. In fact, a new study suggests it’s how you walk that matters.

Instead of tracking steps, science says to focus on this instead.

Duration vs. Step Count: What matters more?

Last week, the journal Annals of Internal Medicine published a study on walking duration and how much it impacted the heart health of 33,560 adults between ages 40 and 79 with varying levels of fitness. For the study, sedentary was defined as people who got less than 5,000 steps daily. Low-active adults were those who regularly piled up 5,000 to 7,999 steps a day.

For a full week, participants wore a research wristband that measured how many steps they took daily and the duration of each walking trip. Researchers categorized people into four groups based on their walking duration: shorter than 5 minutes, 5 to 9 minutes, 10 to 14 minutes, and 15 minutes or longer. The authors then tracked people’s health outcomes for almost a decade and found some pretty interesting results.

First, the obvious. Getting in any type of movement—even a short, 5 minute daily walk—can lower your risk of heart problems and an early death. But the real benefits happened when people took longer walks.

When people took the same amount of steps, those who accumulated steps in one long walk slashed their risk of heart issues and death at a higher rate than people who did frequent but shorter strolls.

“We tend to place all the emphasis on the number of steps or the total amount of walking but neglect the crucial role of patterns, for example ‘how’ walking is done,” says Emmanuel Stamatakis, PhD, professor of physical activity, lifestyle, and population health at The University of Sydney and senior study author. “This study shows that even people who are very physically inactive can maximise their heart health benefit by tweaking their walking patterns to walk for longer at a time.”

This is how much walking you should do daily.

You don’t need to do a full hour to see benefits—15 minutes of continuous walking is long enough to build a healthy heart.

In the study, people who walked for 5 minutes a day had a 13 percent risk of a cardiovascular event like a heart attack or stroke. That risk dropped to 4 percent when people did 15 minutes of daily walking.

The mortality risks of moving less were also most noticeable among people who walked fewer than 5,000 steps a day. Walking only 5 minutes a day brought their risk of death from any cause to be nearly 5 percent. For people who did 15 minutes of daily walking, however, the mortality risk was less than 1 percent.

The findings align with results from a separate study earlier this year that linked 15 minutes of walking to a longer lifespan, if done fast. Fifteen minutes of brisk walking a day resulted in a nearly 20 percent decrease in premature death compared to a 4 percent decrease when people walked slowly for 3 hours.

“For the most inactive people, switching from brief walks here and there to longer continuous walks may come with some health benefits,” explains Matthew Ahmadi, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney and co-lead study author. “Simply adding one or two longer walks per day, each lasting at least 10 to 15 minutes at a comfortable but steady pace, may have significant benefits—especially for people who don’t walk much.”

How to get the most out of your walk.

If you really want to challenge yourself, Dennis Colón, PT, DPT, physical therapist and director of Player Health at Alliance Regen & Rehab, recommends experimenting with brisk walking (3 miles an hour) to further elevate the heart rate.

“Walking should be done at least 10 to 15 minutes at a time with a good pace that over time works up to just under short of breath,” advises Alysia Robichau, MD, a sports medicine physician at Houston Methodist. “That may not be obtainable the first few times you start walking but increasing your pace slowly and working your way up to 10 to 15 minutes can be done over a few weeks easily.”

Another heart-pumping activity is using those 15 minutes to walk uphill. “Incline walking is an excellent way to recruit muscles in the lower body, meet the stroke volume and cardiac demand of the exercise, and avoid joint stress,” says Colón.

Above all, Colón says what matters more than step count or duration is that you make walking a habit. “For sedentary individuals, the key to walking is progression and consistency.”

Jocelyn Solis-Moreira, MS is the associate health & fitness for Men’s Health and has previously written for CNN, Scientific American, Popular Science, and National Geographic before joining the brand. When she’s not working, she’s doing circus arts or working towards the perfect pull-up.