Walking with variable strides uses up more energy than taking consistently sized steps, which suggests it may help to burn more calories.
and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recruited 18 adults, aged between 18 and 45, who were told to walk as normal for 5 minutes on a treadmill while a motion capture system recorded their average stride length.
Based on this, the researchers manipulated their strides during another 5-minute walk by lighting up the treadmill at the positions where they wanted each participant to step. Sometimes this was the same as their average stride length and sometimes it was shorter or longer by 5 per cent or 10 per cent.
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A mouthpiece measured the participants鈥� production of carbon dioxide, which rises during exercise. For every 1 per cent increase in step variability, there was a 0.7 per cent rise in the metabolic cost of walking, defined as the energy expended by the body to move a certain distance.
Although the team didn鈥檛 measure the calories the participants burned, Grimmitt says: 鈥淚 think it would be fair to assume that more frequent and larger variations in stride length would increase your metabolic rate while walking.鈥�
When people have to work to maintain their stability from a short step to a long step, or vice versa, it can increase muscular contraction and then metabolic cost, the researchers say in their paper.
The results may also be relevant to older people, particularly those with a neurological condition, as they tend to walk with more stride variability, they write.
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says that illuminating the treadmill was an innovative approach, but that the link between gait length variability and metabolic cost has been shown before.
bioRxiv
