Walking with a purpose -- especially walking to get to work -- makes people walk faster and consider themselves to be healthier, a new study has found. The study found that walking for different reasons yielded different levels of self-rated health. People who walked primarily to places like work and the grocery store from their homes, for example, reported better health than people who walked mostly for leisure
walking for utilitarian purposes significantly improves your health, and that those types of walking trips are easier to bring into your daily routine
both as city planners and as people, we should try to take the advantage of this as much as possible."
The dataset the researchers analyzed included more than 500,000 trips
an additional 10 minutes of walking per trip from home for work-based trips -- say, from a person's house to the bus stop 10 minutes away -- increased that person's odds of having a higher health score by 6 percent compared with people who walk for other reasons.
people who walked for work walked faster -- on average, about 2.7 miles per hour -- than people who walked for other reasons.
"I was thinking the differences would not be that significant, that walking is walking, and all forms of walking are helpful," she said. "And that is true, but walking for some purposes has significantly greater effect on our health than others."
"That means going to a gym or a recreation center aren't the only ways to exercise," Akar said. "It's an opportunity to put active minutes into our daily schedules in an easy way."