Chronic low back pain may be less likely if you walk – a lot

Now, there’s another reason to go for that long walk on the beach.

A long time spent walking each day may reduce the risk of back pain, a new study suggests. The key word here is “long.” People who walked more than 100 minutes per day were nearly 25 percent less likely to have chronic low back pain than people who walked fewer than 78 minutes per day, scientists report June 13 in JAMA Network Open.

And study participants didn’t need to be speed walkers, either. Time spent walking seemed to matter more than intensity, researchers found. “The more people walked, the lower their risk,” says Rayane Haddadj, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. After about 100 minutes, that back-pain benefit leveled off.

Low back pain is the single leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Treatments, which include medication, physical therapy and surgery, can be time-consuming and painful. ­Haddadj and his colleagues were looking for ways to reduce people’s risk in the first place.

His team analyzed data from over 11,000 adults who averaged 55 years old. All wore movement tracking devices for up to a week to establish each person’s walking habits. None of the participants reported chronic low back pain at the start of the study. About four years later, roughly 1,700 of them did.

People who walked more than 100 minutes per day were less likely to have chronic low back pain than those who walked less, Haddadj and his colleagues discovered. That’s a hint that walking might prevent low back pain ­— but the work does not prove it, he says. It’s possible that people’s walking habits changed over the four-year time period. What’s more, the study was observational, so it can’t establish cause and effect.

Haddadj envisions future research that includes randomized controlled trials to help answer this question. Understanding walking’s potential role in preventing chronic back pain is important, he says, because walking is “simple, low cost and accessible.”

If it does indeed lower people’s chances of developing back pain, walking could offer an activity that’s relatively easy to pick up ­­— a cakewalk compared to other interventions.