Walking with a purpose is healthier than a casual stroll: Study

While taking a walk is helpful in maintaining physical fitness, a recent study has revealed that walking with a purpose - especially walking to get to work, makes people walk faster and consider themselves to be healthier. The study, published online earlier this month in the Journal of Transport and Health, 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. The study used data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, a U.S. dataset collected from April 2016 to May 2017. The researchers analysed self-reported health assessments from 125,885 adults between the ages of 18 and 64. Those adults reported the number of minutes they spent walking for different purposes - from home to work, from home to shopping, from home to recreation activities and walking trips that did not start at their homes. And, the survey respondents ranked how healthy they were on a scale of 1 to 5. The dataset the researchers analysed included more than 500,000 trips. The researchers also found that walking trips that begin at home are generally longer than walking trips that begin somewhere else.