10 Walking Mistakes You Don't Even Realize You're Making
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As far as exercise routines go, walking seems fairly straightforward: You put one foot in front of the other, and keep going until you reach your destination or decide you’ve had enough.
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Yet how you walk—your pace, posture, stride, and even what’s on your feet—shapes how much you actually get out of it. “People take walking for granted and don’t recognize the inherent power in doing it correctly,” says Milica McDowell, a physical therapist and co-author of the new book Walk: Rediscover the Most Natural Way to Boost Your Health and Longevity―One Step at a Time. “From a big-picture perspective, doing it well amps up your benefits and reduces your risk of problems.”
The payoff for getting it right is bigger than you might realize. Research suggests that walking roughly 8,700 steps a day cuts the risk of dying from any cause by 60% compared to walking 2,000 steps daily. That same study, which included more than 110,000 people, found that walking about 7,100 steps a day was linked to a 51% reduction in risk of heart disease.
So what’s standing between you and those benefits? We asked experts to walk us through the small mistakes that add up to less benefit and more wear and tear over time.
Thinking walking “doesn’t count”
If you’ve ever waved off the idea of a walk as “real” exercise, you’re in good company—and you’re wrong. “It’s essentially just as good as running, biking, or swimming. It just takes a little longer,” says Dr. David Sabgir, a cardiologist and founder of Walk with a Doc, a nonprofit that organizes walking events with physicians around the world. Sabgir hears this misconception from patients constantly and says walking’s health benefits “really match up with just about anything.”
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The key, Sabgir says, is making it a habit. Showing up most days of the week, even briefly, matters more than any single long walk. “Consistency is the most important characteristic of improving,” he says. “Most days of the week, ideally it's 20 to 30 minutes, but for those of us who are at 3 or 4 minutes and still get out—that’s absolutely outstanding, because you'll get there in time.”
Walking too slowly
A leisurely pace might feel relaxing, but it’s also a missed opportunity—and potentially an early warning sign. Walking speed has been called the “sixth vital sign,” McDowell says, a metric clinicians should hold “in as high a regard as your heart rate, your breathing rate, your oxygenation, and your body temperature.” Research suggests that slower gait speed is associated with an increased risk of developing dementia, sometimes years before diagnosis. “If someone is walking slowly, that can become something health care providers can identify and then start assessing, testing, and investigating,” she says.
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To check your own pace, McDowell suggests a quick self-test: Count your steps for 15 seconds and multiply by four to get your steps per minute. “Anything that’s around 80 is pretty slow,” she says. “Most people walk around 100 steps per minute.” The bigger health benefits, including fat burning and cardiovascular gains, kick in around 120 to 130 steps per minute—a pace she describes as “not late for the airplane, but walking through the airport with intention.”
The fix might surprise you: “The way to walk faster is to swing your arms more,” McDowell says. Bigger, faster arm swings rotate the torso and pull the rest of the body along with them. “The arms are sort of like the conductor—they lead the rest of the coordination,” she says.
Holding your phone while you walk
Scrolling, texting, or thumbing through your podcast queue mid-walk doesn’t just put you at risk of bumping into a lamppost. It also wrecks your posture, Sabgir says, and can lead to neck issues as well as back and hip pain. Looking down at a screen also means you’re missing the cognitive break that makes walking such a powerful mood-shifter, and it pulls your attention away from the terrain ahead—a setup for a fall. Better to leave your device in your pocket, lift your gaze, and let your arms swing freely.
Leaning forward from the torso
Watch yourself walk, and you might notice your upper body drifting slightly ahead of your lower body—head and shoulders leading the way, torso angled forward. It’s an extremely common pattern, and biomechanist Katy Bowman, author of Rethink Your Position, says we have our chairs to blame. Hours of sitting tighten the front of the hips and round the upper back, and that shape doesn’t disappear the moment you stand up.
“You have some of that chair baggage that’s staying with you,” Bowman says. She compares it to semi-permanent hair dye: “It takes a while to get that out of your body.”
Walking with a forward lean creates a cascade of problems. It shifts pressure to the front of the foot, which can aggravate toe pain and change how you move forward. “A lot of people will describe walking as controlled falling,” Bowman says. “But mechanically, that’s not what we want. That’s an indication of not-great balance, and actually not working as much muscle as you could be.”
To recalibrate, Bowman recommends a quick reset before you head out: “Go to a wall and put your butt against it, and try to bring your head and shoulders against that wall,” she advises. “Feel what upright really feels like, and then try to walk from that position.” Keep checking in on your form throughout your walk, she adds, since chair posture has a way of creeping back.
Not pushing off with your glutes
Once you’re standing tall, the next question is how you’re actually propelling yourself forward. Most people, Bowman says, aren’t really pushing off at all—they’re falling and catching themselves with the next step. The fix is to think like you’re rowing a boat.
“If you imagine sitting in a rowboat and needing to move forward, the way you move your boat forward is by pushing your oar backwards,” she says. Walking works the same way. “Stand up and push one foot down into the ground, and let the other foot lift off. Now you’re standing on one foot, and that foot that’s on the ground is the oar. It has to push back, and it pushes back with a glute contraction.”
Her shorthand for the cue: “Put your walk behind you.”
The payoff goes well beyond posture. Falling into each step delivers a hard landing on the feet and knees and bypasses the body’s largest muscles entirely. Pushing off engages the glutes, which Bowman says stabilizes the lower back and “takes the load off the knees.” Over time, that translates to less wear on vulnerable joints and more strength in the muscles built to do the work.
Letting your arms hang (or clasping them behind your back)
Look around the next time you’re ambling down your favorite trail, and you’ll almost certainly spot a walker who has both their hands clasped behind their back. It’s a surprisingly bad habit. “If you were to lose your balance and start to fall, it’s very difficult to fall safely,” McDowell says. It also throws off your posture by rolling the shoulders forward and forcing the torso to hinge at the hips, she adds—a setup that often produces a shuffling gait and makes tripping more likely.
Letting your arms hang limp at your sides isn’t much better. If you’re not swinging them, your torso doesn’t rotate, and the rest of your body loses the coordination cue it relies on to move efficiently. McDowell’s suggestion: Make the swing slightly bigger and slightly faster than feels natural, and let your lower body follow.
Not picking up your feet
Some of us have walking styles that announce themselves from a room away—think sole-scraping or heel-dragging. That noise is a clue that something in your gait isn’t doing its job, Bowman says.
“In shuffling, the foot just sort of lands as a single unit,” she says. “Or sometimes it doesn’t even leave the ground at all.” A normal walking stride moves through the foot in stages—heel strike, foot flat, roll forward, toe-off. When that sequence flattens into a single thud, your tripping risk increases, and your muscles and joints don’t absorb impact as efficiently—potentially leading to strain in the ankles, knees, and hips.
The encouraging news, Bowman says, is that most shuffling is fixable with targeted exercises that build hip strength and ankle mobility.
Wearing the wrong shoes
There’s more to figuring out which walking shoes are right for you than debating which brand’s logo you like best. McDowell points to a 2018 study finding that more than 60% of adults wear shoes that are the wrong size, often because they assumed their feet stopped changing the day they stopped growing taller. “That’s a huge misconception,” she says.
Sizing across brands isn’t standardized either. “It’s very common to be a 10 in a Nike, a 10.5 in an Adidas, a 43 in a Birkenstock,” McDowell says. The fix: Have your feet measured professionally once a year, or print a free foot-measurement chart at home and check your size yourself. Wearing shoes that are too small can contribute to bunions, hammertoes, heel pain, and stress fractures over time, she says. Shoes that are too big create their own problem: Your toes have to claw to keep the shoe on, and a foot that's sliding around inside the shoe can become a fall risk.
The more counterintuitive issue is cushioning. The thick, pillowy, elevated-heel running shoes that dominate today’s market may feel comfortable, McDowell says, but they’re doing too much of the foot’s job. “Essentially, people’s feet are getting weaker and stiffer in those over-engineered shoes,” she says. Her preference: shoes with a wide toe box, a low heel-to-toe drop, and less cushion, which force the foot’s own muscles to do the work they evolved to do.
Whatever you’re wearing, replace it before it falls apart. Sabgir says most walking shoes are good for around 300 to 400 miles, “and a lot of us, myself included, let our shoes go too long.” That can cascade into foot, knee, and back problems. To check your current pair, flip them over: a healthy wear pattern looks roughly like the number 7—starting on the outside of the heel and angling toward the big toe.
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Wear concentrated on the inside edge can signal over-pronation, in which the foot rolls inward too far and stresses the knees, hips, and lower back. Wear all along the outside edge can point to supination, where a too-rigid foot fails to absorb shock and can drive stress fractures or joint pain. And if your right and left shoes look meaningfully different, your gait may be compensating for an old injury or muscular imbalance worth flagging to a physical therapist.
Ignoring your toes
It sounds absurd, but the strength of your big toe may be one of the better predictors of whether you’ll fall as you age. Research has linked weaker big-toe flexion strength—your ability to press the toe firmly into the ground—to poorer balance and higher fall risk. “It’s not all the toes,” McDowell says. “It’s just the big toe.” The toe is also responsible for propulsion, the final push that drives each step forward.
Two at-home tests can tell you a lot. The first is what McDowell calls toe yoga: Sit barefoot in a chair, lift just your big toe while the other four stay flat on the floor, and then reverse it—big toe down, little toes up. “Most people can’t do that,” she says.
The second is a credit-card test. Slide a card under your big toe, have a friend try to pull it out, and see if you can press down hard enough to keep it in place. Strength on the right may not match the left, McDowell says—old ankle sprains, fractures, or numbness can all leave their fingerprint there. The good news is that both deficits respond quickly to practice, like doing toe yoga at your desk during the work day. “It’s so encouraging because even practicing for a week, people start to notice a difference,” she says.
Always walking the same route at the same speed on flat ground
That loop you do around your neighborhood is lovely—same neighbor on the front-porch, same patch of sunlight on the pavement, same goldendoodle at the same corner. Yet getting too comfortable with any one route can be a problem. “Walking is a category of a bunch of moves,” Bowman says, and always trotting down flat sidewalks at one speed misses most of them.
Instead, she recommends varying the terrain (lumpy grass beats pavement for balance and body awareness), the speed (add short bursts of intensity), and the route, even if it just means walking your usual loop the other way. Look for hills and steps, Bowman advises, or find a curb and practice walking with one foot up and one down. In addition to being good for you physically, it’ll likely give you a mental jolt, too. “Your brain gets tired of doing the same thing all the time,” she says, “so novelty will keep you sticking with it.”