WE’RE LIVING IN the age of longevity. Long may it live – pun fully intended. But bloodwork, DEXA scans, infrared measurements… all of this stuff comes at a cost. And there are much simpler tests that can tell you how well things are really ticking along – and, by extension, how long you’re likely to live (if you want to know that sort of thing – not for me).
One of the simplest? How fast you walk.
Why Walking Speed Is Linked to Longevity
In a meta-analysis of nearly 35,000 adults, researchers found that gait speed predicted survival better than any standard medical test. Not better than some – better than all of them.
It’s not because there’s anything special about walking speed in isolation. It’s because the speed you walk at can act as a full systems check on many of the processes going on in your body. To walk at a decent clip, your heart has to deliver, your lungs have to keep up, your muscles have to produce force, your joints have to tolerate that force, and your brain has to coordinate the whole shebang. If any of that starts to degrade, you slow down.
Importantly, a lot of what we chalk up to ‘just getting older’ isn’t true physiological degradation. It’s more like your body adapting to you doing less and less – a kind of reverse flywheel of ageing. You do less, so you get worse at doing those things… so you do them even less.
And one of the biggest things we do less of? Moving across distance.
How Walking More Can Improve Your Health
Walking isn’t just low-level cardio. It’s not just ‘exercise’. It’s a daily input that tells your body it needs to keep all of its systems up to scratch. Load through the skeleton stimulates bone remodelling. Repeated muscle contraction helps move blood and lymph. Your spine, your connective tissue, even your gut – all of it works better when you’re regularly locomoting.
It’s not just your body that benefits, either. In a 2011 study, a group of previously sedentary adults were put on a simple protocol: walk for 40 minutes, three times per week. After a year, the part of the brain responsible for memory – the hippocampus – had grown by around 2%. Not just ‘protected from decline’. Grown.
So – good for the body, good for the mind.
What Is a ‘Good’ Walking Speed?
In the data, a walking speed of around one metre per second (roughly 2.2-2.5 miles per hour) lines up with average life expectancy. Move closer to 2.7 miles per hour, and outcomes tend to improve. Drop below around 1.3 miles per hour, and the risk of early death climbs sharply.
It’s not that walking faster directly causes you to live longer. It’s that your walking speed reflects how well your entire system is functioning – heart, lungs, muscles, brain – all feeding into that number.
But here’s the good news: this is one of those rare cases where improving the marker can help improve the system itself.
Walk more, and the system improves. Push the pace slightly, and you nudge everything even further in the right direction.
So yes – gait speed might ‘just’ be a marker. But it’s one you can actively influence.
Which makes the takeaway pretty simple:
Walk a lot. And walk a little bit faster.
Related:
I tried the 6-6-6 walking challenge for 30 days; here’s what happened
