The “latest” scientific advice in relation to health and longevity seems to be that walking is the best exercise for our organism. The classical postman pounds the beat (oh, hey, maybe the old-time policeman on the beat also fits into this category) day in and day out throughout his or her career. So what’s the true dope about postmen and healthy hearts, etc.? (excepting of course the ones who smoke or drink to excess)
While I am not aware of any data that looks specifically at mail workers I’d doubt that regular walking alone would trump other factors associated with longevity. In generalthe more skilled one is, the less you rely on manual labor for you livelihood, the longer you live.
Being married and having kids is associated with longer lifespan (beyond that it just feels longer). So is higher educational status, and of course nutritional habits in addition to exercise. Having a sense of autonomy is also associated with longer life span.
Walking for a healthy adult doesn’t provide much cardiovascular training. I can clip along at 4km per hour without much trouble, and my heart rate doesnt climb much past 112. My minimal optimal heart rate for my sex and age group is 117. I’ve even been mostly sedentary for the last 20 years.
My father was a postman/mailman/letter carrier who walked his route for most of his career. He was very healthy until his tobacco smoking habit caught up with him. He died just before turning 60.
I do quite a bit of walking, including half marathons, and I’m pretty healthy. I also ride my bicycle about 4000 miles a year. I did have a minor heart attack in 2000 but I was doing a max effort on my bicycle and had my heart rate over 180 bpm at age 46.
I guess time will tell.
Heck yes walking is very good exercise! Google “is walking good for you” and you’ll get a ton of hist so many that links need not be posted. Whether that leads to “long healthy lives for postmen” is another question but it obviously helps. Except in the case of the postmen in my town all of whom drive. Even then they are more active then sedentary desk jobs.
Letter carriers are on their feet a lot, true. Is that the same thing as walking as exercise? That I’m not so sure about.
First, most routes in America are driving routes, going from one curbside box to another. True walking routes are mostly limited to central cities, although there may be some exceptions in older suburbs where the houses are close together. The image of a carrier walking from house to house is a limited one even inside cities. A large percentage of city routes include large buildings, either office buildings or apartment houses. You can have as many stops inside an office building as you would in a large subdivision. Apartment houses have a central mail depository, so dozens or even hundreds of addresses are delivered at one time.
So we’re down to a tiny fraction of carriers doing extensive walking. But is it walking that contributes to exercise? The procedure is that you drive to a point on the street. You collect the bundle of letters and “flats” (magazines, catalogs, manila envelopes, etc.) and gather it in one arm or in a bag. That’s weighs a ton at the start and pulls you off balance with every step. You walk a few feet up the driveway and stop at the box. There you deal the letters off the top of the stack, flip through the top flats, and check to see whether there is another else - small packages that will fit in the box, special mail that needs to be signed for - that you have to deal with. All this might take almost as much time as walking that driveway. So you’re standing still half the time, never letting your body go into anaerobic mode. You continue doing this, through heat and rain and snow and snowdrifts and ice at varying paces, until your feet hurt too much to continue. Then you hope you don’t have a couple more streets to go.
It’s probably better than sitting at a desk all day, snacking, but I wouldn’t call it proper exercise and I wouldn’t expect that carriers have any special fitness imparted by their jobs. Beat cops probably have the same off and on pattern as well.
What’s your basis for claiming that most routes in America are driving routes? Here in Springfield, mail carriers still deliver door to door.
I’m having problems finding exact numbers, because what the census calls an urbanized area includes suburban areas. Suburbs and exurbs have been growing far faster than urban areas, 26,000,000 to 1,250,000 from 2000-2010, and that’s been true for decades. (From a pdf I can’t link to.) More than half the country now lives in non-central cities. Nearly all of those will be driving routes. As I said, some will be walking routes and some people will pick up their mail at the post office, but the vast majority are curbside. And many city routes will be apartment building to apartment building, not door-to-door.
Springfield is a city and I said specifically that cities have walking routes. How does that contradict me in any way?
I’d bet good money that letter carriers with walking routes have an earlier and more frequent rate of joint replacement surgery than the average person; at the get-togethers with his coworkers, it’s common to hear people as young as their late 40s/early 50s talk about their joint replacements.
Plus my dear husband (also a poster on this board) is home right now, facing 6-8 weeks minimum off of work. He had a stress fracture in his foot due to the stresses of several miles a day of walking routes, and hopefully can avoid needing surgery if just casting it works out.
Cite? I don’t doubt your claim at all, I’d just like to read about the research. I find this intriguing and this is the first time I’ve heard it.
Got a cite for that (rather dubious) claim? I deleted your anecdotal stuff since it’s not relevant.
I think it is called “good exercise” solely because it sits diametrically to a sedentary lifestyle, which is bad. It is the baseline exercise.
I visit the local swimming pool nearly daily and walk 1000 meters (sometimes 2 km). My heart rate is no more elevated for that than a simple walk.
Walking in the pool is simply lower impact, which is why people with mobility issues train in the pool.
The training pool is 1 meter (or 3 feet) deep. I go with my mother, who needs a knee replacement. 10 laps is about 1000 meters, and each lap takes her 2 minutes or so. 20 minutes for a km isnt very fast, but you can only push through water so quickly. I can do a lap in about 1.5 minutes. We do however many she feels up to.
In order to be truly “good exercise”, walking has to be superior to some other choice. What would that choice be?
I’m wondering about selection bias. Do retired armed-forces personnel still get preference for postal jobs? (They can retire at, say, age 38 if they went in at 18.) You’d expect them to be in good shape anyway. So if they become carriers, that might skew the results.
I recall reading this in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Outliers. Well worth a read, and he’ll direct you to the original research if you want to explore more deeply.
Sorry John Mace, I didnt notice this earlier.
The best cite is specific to a person in this case. Figure out your optimal training heart rate for your sex and age, and then take a walk and check your pulse. You can get a rough idea by subtracting your age from 220. That is the dangerous end.
I’m male, 40 years old. My booklet for my pulse measuring watch says my heart rate should be 117-153 for optimal training. If I walk hard at 4 km/h, I reach about 108 in my pulse, so I’m not doing very efficient cardio training. If I sprint I hit about 165.
My minimal beneficial rate would be 0.65 of that (from what my booklet says), and my maximum optimal is 0.85 of a pulse of 180. I’m not sure how those percentages are determined, but it seems closely in line with any results I can find online. ie: everyone claims roughly the same numbers.
So while walking, I am not building cardiovascular endurance. I’m sorry for having more personal anecdotes, all I could offer you is search results to various exercise web sites. I know we have some resident nurses and doctors. Perhaps they can affirm those target rates? Would that be satisfactory?
None of the web sites I have visited have claimed that walking is pointless, it is just my opinion that I’ll never get in a useful training range by walking. And I am not particularly healthy.
One thing I hate is being wrong, so if you would cut me to pieces, I look forward to your reply.
Generally good cardiovascular exercise is anything that sustains a heart rate around 80% of maximum (maximum heart rate can be roughly calculated by subtracting your age from 220.) For many people brisk walking can easily meet this criteria, for someone very highly trained you may not elevate your heart as much even with a brisk walk, so you might have to do a speed walk or walk on an elevated treadmill or up and down stairs to get a higher enough heart rate.
Eventually for a very fit person it would just make more sense to jog or ride a bike.
While the article I linked to quotes Karen Jochelson, a research fellow at The King’s Fund, a health think tank stating it, and I have read it in reviews previously, I cannot manage to find any primary data that the claim is based on. Sorry.
This is the closest I can get. Positive self perceptions of aging (SPA) predict “future long-term vulnerability to health decline and mortality.”
I think it’s impossible for a healthy adult to walk hard at 4 km/h. Back when I walked regularly, I would sustain a 7.5 km/h speed for over an hour. That felt like hard walking. Now that I’m sedentary and weigh 70 lbs. more than I used to, 6 km/h is hard walking to me. 4 km/h is loitering, IME.
It’s really common to hear people say walking isn’t effective enough. Not once have I witnessed these commentators actually walking hard.
Just a half hour walk a day is GREAT for preserving a minimal health to avoid most illnesses related to “Sedentary lifestyles”.