The way you walk can provide information about how your body is functioning.

Walk

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Do you prefer to swim fast or slow? This may seem like a trivial question, but the reality is that your walking speed reveals information about the rate of brain aging and the inner workings of your brain.

Indeed, research has shown that the pace at which a person travels from point A to point B can provide clues about the likelihood of hospitalization, heart attack, or other health-related situations.

To give you an idea, the walking speed test is a way to assess a person's functional capacity. It can even predict how well they will respond to rehabilitation after a stroke.

How does it work?

For this exercise, all you need is a stopwatch and a means of measuring distance, such as a tape measure. Alternatively, there are some apps that can measure your walking pace , including fitness trackers.

Now, if you're outdoors, you can test this by setting a 10-meter boundary. First, measure 5 meters, followed by another 10 meters, and when you're done, simply divide 10 meters by the number of seconds it took you to walk that distance.

Walk

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If you need to compare the results, the average walking speed for a woman aged 40 to 49 is 1.39 m/s and 1.43 m/s for a man of the same age. For those older than 40, the average walking speed is 1.31 m/s for a woman and 1.43 m/s for a man aged 50 to 59.

For people aged 60 to 69 , the average walking speed drops to 1.24 m/s for women and 1.43 m/s for men; while for people aged 70 to 79, the average walking speed is 1.13 m/s for women and 1.26 m/s for men.

While it's normal for people to walk more slowly as they age, a sudden decrease in someone's walking speed could indicate something else is going on, so it's always a good idea to get medical checkups to be on the lookout.

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