When it comes to walking for health, longer is better, study suggests

Extending the length of your daily walks can benefit your heart, new research suggests

Extending the length of your daily walks can benefit your heart, new research suggests.

In a study conducted among healthy adults, people who accumulated most of their daily steps in bouts of 15 minutes or longer had significantly lower risks of heart disease and death nearly a decade later than those who got in several shorter walks throughout the day. The study was published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

What’s more, adults who had been less active in the past and went on longer walks showed the greatest health gains.

An international team of scientists looked at the daily movements of 33,560 adults aged 62 on average and living in the U.K., using information collected from 2013 through 2015 in a medical research database called the UK Biobank. For three to seven days, participants wore an accelerometer on their wrist that recorded their physical activity.

Researchers divided the people into four groups, based on how they logged most of their steps each day: in bouts shorter than five minutes, five to less than 10 minutes, 10 to less than 15 minutes and 15 minutes or longer. The largest group — 42.9% of participants — fell into the under-five-minute category.