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If you monitor your health at home, there are a number of ways to check and maintain your good health. This can include self-exams, keeping a record of important vital signs, and researching preventative medicine options. However, one measurement that most people don’t think about is evaluating physical activity levels. Walking is one of the best ways to improve or maintain general health and wellbeing. It can be an important part of a healthy lifestyle. But it can also be a reliable predictor of ill health in some situations. Keep reading to learn how this measurement can indicate overall health levels, and what to do if you show any associated warning signs.

 

Why Slow Walking is Important

Diseases don’t just appear out of nowhere. There are always signs and symptoms. Unfortunately, we often ignore those symptoms because we’re busy, or don’t want to admit that something might be wrong. This can be extremely detrimental for your personal health. But sometimes the symptoms are so small and vague that we just dismiss them. That’s why it’s always good to have other, more reliable and noticeable predictors of future ill health. Although the links between health and walking pace aren’t clear, it can still act as one of your most reliable health measurements.

 

The Link between Slow Walking and Personal Health

A recent study conducted in the UK showed that middle aged people who were slow walkers were at greater risk of heart disease. The data for this study was collected from nearly half a million people over a period of four years. It found that people who described themselves as slow walkers were twice more likely to have a heart related death than brisk walkers. There seemed to be no gender difference to this finding, and it could not be explained by other risk factors. But because of the strength of these results, the study strongly suggests that walking pace is a good, independent predictor of heart related death.

 

Everyone has known for a long time that cardiovascular fitness is an important predictor of mortality. That’s why people who are trying to avoid cardiovascular disease usually focus on this area of their life. This study showed that walking pace might be the simplest and most reliable way to measure cardiovascular fitness, overall health and exercise tolerance, those all-important indicators of overall cardiovascular health.

 

This study was also used to test if there was a link between walking pace and the risk of death by cancer. No strong links were found in this case. However, walking pace may be still be a good way to monitor overall health and pick up any changes associated with cancer processes.

 

 

Implications for your Personal Health

After reading this study, you may think that all you have to do is increase your walking pace to decrease your chance of heart related death. However, it may not be that simple. Walking pace may be controlled by factors other than physical fitness, such as learned behaviors, or as a result of natural body preferences. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to alter your walking pace, just that it will take time and patience to change the habit. The true benefit of this predictor of ill health is that it can provide you with the motivation you need to make changes.

 

Make an assessment of your natural walking pace a regular part of your personal health checks. And if you notice that you have this predictor of future ill health, you have the time to change things. This will mean taking preventative measures by making changes to your overall lifestyle. These changes will probably include improving your cardiovascular health by whatever methods work for you. You will also need to become more vigilant with your personal health monitoring routines. Let this measurement of ill health act as a wakeup call, before you’re given one that’s much more serious.

 

It’s important that you see your doctor for regular health checks, but you should also monitor your health at home. You can do this using tools such as HomeLab, which will help you to keep track of your condition and any preventative measures you take. And if you see signs of a significant problem, take the results of your health checks to your doctor.

 

Tag: Personal health, health check, preventative