Getting 10,000 steps a day is a popular fitness goal for millions of people.
But experts believe that a less time-consuming alternative can be effective when it comes to losing weight.
Research suggests that walking with uneven steps may help you burn more calories than constant-sized steps.
American scientists, who tracked the movements of 18 healthy adults, found that for every one percent increase in step variability, there was a 0.7 percent increase in energy used.
The results showed that uneven steps “play a modest but significant role” in the metabolic cost of walking, the experts said.
Walking with uneven steps may help burn more calories than constant-sized steps, research suggests. American scientists, who tracked the movements of 18 healthy adults, found that for every one percent increase in step variability, there was a 0.7 percent increase in energy used.
The team did not measure the calories the participants burned.
However, study co-author Adam Grimmitt, an expert in exercise physiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said: “I think it would be fair to assume that more frequent and larger variations in stride length would increase the metabolic rate during walking.”
In the study, volunteers (aged 24 years and weighing an average of 70.5 kg) were asked to walk normally for five minutes on a treadmill.
A motion capture system recorded their average stride length at a common speed of 1.2 meters per second.
They then manipulated their steps during a second 5-minute treadmill walk by turning it on where they wanted the participants to step.
Stances ranged up to five and 10 percent shorter and longer than the average stride length.
All volunteers were also fitted with a mouthpiece that measured their rate of carbon dioxide production. This increases during exercise.
The findings, posted on the preprint website, bioRxivsuggested that when people have to work to maintain their stability from a short to a long step, or vice versa, this can increase muscle contraction and then metabolic cost, the researchers said.
“Our data suggest that a 2.7 percent increase in step length variability would increase the metabolic cost of walking by 1.7 percent,” they added.
“Step length variability plays a modest, although significant, role in the metabolic cost of walking.”
The findings may be more relevant to older adults, particularly those with neurological conditions, given that they walk with “greater variability in step length,” they also said.
However, the researchers acknowledged that changing length in 5 percent intervals is “different from real-world gait variability.”
Participants “still had trouble maintaining accuracy” when changing their stride lengths without additional feedback, they added.
“Future studies should quantify the accuracy of foot placement and muscle activity in similar virtual projections.”
