Putting your best foot forward – the benefits of walking

We keep seeing it on television, our phones, and over the airwaves – walking is one of the best exercises out there.

What makes it so? Save with SPP decided to prowl around the Interweb to see what people are saying about the health benefits of walking.

According to the Mayo Clinic, “regular brisk walking” can help maintain or manage your weight, “prevent or manage various health conditions” such as “heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, several cancers and type 2 diabetes,” improve heart health and fitness, and build endurance.

As well, the article continues, walking helps strengthen your bones, boosts your energy level, “improves mood, thinking, memory and sleep,” reduces stress and anxiety and “improves your physical function and, in older adults, lowers fall risk.”

The Clinic suggests that “walking faster and farther” is linked to the best results. “If you are just starting out, slowly work your way up to walking faster and farther. Over time, you may notice you can walk farther in less time. This helps you get aerobic activity, improve heart health, build endurance and burn calories.”

The Prevention website chimes in on the health benefits of a nice brisk stroll, noting that it can help your cognitive function and overall heart health.

“Walking is an easy-to-do exercise that has so many benefits with very little risk of injury or death,” Adam Mills, exercise physiologist and cycling coach at Source Endurance, states in the Prevention article.

The key, the article continues, is to get in at least 30 minutes of walking per day.

And, the article says, all the stuff you read about aiming for 10,000 steps a day may be overdoing it.

“A 2021 study published in JAMA Network Open found that for people ages 38 to 50, 7,000 steps was associated with a lower mortality rate,” Prevention reports. “And a 2025 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that people who walked a minimum of 4,000 steps daily at least three days a week had a 40 per cent lower risk of dying (prematurely),” the article adds.

Any amount of walking helps and is beneficial, the article concludes.

Last word to the folks at Harvard, who add a few “surprising benefits” we can achieve from regular walking.

A half-hour of walking briskly “counteracts the effects of weight-promoting genes,” the article begins. This, the article says, is a way to counter the risks and effects of obesity.

Interestingly, walking “helps tame a sweet tooth.” Research from the University of Exeter, the article reports, found that even “a 15-minute walk can curb cravings for chocolate and even reduce the amount of chocolate you eat in stressful situations. And the latest research confirms that walking can reduce cravings and intake of a variety of sugary snacks,” the article notes.

Walking regularly reduces your risk of breast cancer, “eases joint pain,” and can boost your immune function, the article reports. “Walking can help protect you during cold and flu season. A study of over 1,000 men and women found that those who walked at least 20 minutes a day, at least 5 days a week, had 43 per cent fewer sick days than those who exercised once a week or less.”

So, the next time you’re thinking of driving to the corner store for milk, consider putting on your running shoes and taking a stroll. You’ll be doing yourself – and your health – a big favour, while at the same time, saving a little on gas.

And a great place to park those savings is the Saskatchewan Pension Plan.

The SPP was created to provide a pension plan for those of us who don’t have one through work – or want to supplement any plan we do have. SPP is open to any Canadian with registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) room – you can contribute any amount you want each year up to your personal RRSP limit.

As well, you can transfer in any amount from other RRSPs you may have, to consolidate your retirement savings nest egg.

Funds deposited in SPP are professionally invested in a low-cost, diversified pooled fund. When it’s time to turn savings into retirement income, your options as an SPP member include the security of a lifetime monthly annuity payment or the flexibility of the Variable Benefit.

Check out SPP today!

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We had just finished off a one-hour line dancing class the other day when a friend excitedly pointed out that her watch had counted X thousand steps for the hour.

Golf buddies of ours also seem to have embraced this new trend — their watches not only count strokes, distances, calculate golf handicaps and so on, but now, count steps. So it’s Y thousand steps per round of golf.

Save with SPP, as a known technical luddite, decided to take a closer look at why everyone seems to be into this new trend.

According to the Health Prep blog, step counters “have become increasingly popular over the past decade,” and are “great tools for increasing your overall fitness level and encouraging healthy habits.” The counters are typically either built into your smart watch, or are devices you wear on your wrist or attach to your belt, but they all do the same thing — “they measure the movement of the individual’s body to calculate the number of steps they have taken,” the article explain.

Some of the smart watches also measure “heart rate, calories burned and sleep patterns,” the article notes, adding that the devices can lead one into more exercise and ideally, fitness and weight lost.

Okay, so it counts your steps — how many should you be shooting for?

An article on the Mayo Clinic website says the average American walks 3,000 to 4,000 steps a day, but that a popular step counter target is 10,000 a day.

But, the article advises, rather than shooting for that target right out of the box, you should first get a handle on what your average “step day” looks like. “It’s a good idea to find out how many steps a day you walk now, as your own baseline. Then you can work up toward the goal of 10,000 steps by aiming to add 1,000 extra steps a day every two weeks,” the article notes.

This makes great sense. How can you “improve” your walking if you don’t know how much you were doing before you got the watch?

The article says that increased walking has many health benefits, including reducing the risk for heart disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and depression.

An article on the Live Science blog explores the benefits a little further. It’s good for the average person because the step counting data received is “intuitive and understandable to the layperson… easy to measure, objective, motivational and help(s) to facilitate behaviour change.”

U.S. guidelines suggest that 150 to 300 minutes a week of “moderate intensity exercise,” like walking, is the recommended level for adults. If the activity is “vigorous intensity,” (perhaps running, say) the recommended adult level is 75 to 150 minute a week, the article says.

An article on the Inverse blog expands on the idea of knowing what your baseline daily step count is before shooting for the magic 10,000 figure.

The article contends that 10,000 steps is not a scientific target, but the result of a marketing campaign for an early Japanese step counter.

“The gadget was named Manpo-kei because, in Japanese, it translates to “10,000 steps meter,” the article notes. “But the idea of 10,000 steps as an `ideal’ wasn’t exactly based in science. Rather, the Japanese character for “10,000” resembles a person walking — so it’s commonly thought, though hard to prove definitively, that the seeming similarity is the humble origin story of a now much-vaunted fitness target,” the article adds.

The article reiterates what we’ve seen elsewhere, that the typical person only walks 2,700 to 4,400 steps a day, so rather than trying to double or triple their typical day’s walking, they should increase it incrementally.

Save with SPP walked for exercise while working in downtown Toronto. At our least fit level, we could walk perhaps four blocks in an hour. We gradually increased our distance (speed) and by the end of our time there could walk maybe 10 blocks in the same period of time. Start with what you can handle, and gradually increase your goal.

It’s a similar story with retirement saving. Start by putting away an amount you can afford — we started with $25 a month in the mid-1980s. As you earn more, ratchet it up, and by paying yourself first, you won’t even notice that you are putting away hundreds, and eventually thousands, away. A great destination for those hard-earned savings is the Saskatchewan Pension Plan. Check them out today!

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