Could it be that your workouts are too strenuous? We’ll look at the benefits of walking today.
Take a breather during your next workout: Walking might protect against diabetes more than running does, that’s according to research from Duke University.
In the study, researchers had people with prediabetes—a common condition where your blood sugar is elevated, but not quite at the level to count as diabetes—walk briskly or jog 13.8 miles a week for 6 months.
They discovered that those in the walking group showed nearly 6 times greater improvement in their glucose tolerance—which measures how well their cells absorb blood sugar—than the joggers did.
More research needs to be done to figure out why exactly walking seems more protective against diabetes than running, but researchers have some theories.
One possibility? When you perform moderate exercise—like walking three miles—your body taps into its stores of fatty acids to fuel it more than it does when you exercise vigorously, like jogging the same distance.
That’s good news for those at risk for diabetes: Too much fatty acids can make it harder for your body to process insulin.
Until further research is performed, it’s not quite clear whether walking affects the bodies of healthy people in the same way it does for those who are prediabetic.
Still, the findings apply to more people than you may think: More than 1 out of every 3 Americans is prediabetic, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.