The benefits of lunch hour walk

To combat afternoon slumps in enthusiasm and focus, take a walk during the lunch hour. A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly – and immediately –
buoy people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work.

Many past studies of the effects of walking and other exercise on mood have focused on somewhat long-term, gradual outcomes, looking at how weeks or months of exercise change people emotionally. But, fewer studies have examined more-abrupt, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes in people’s moods, depending on whether they exercise,
and even fewer have focused on these effects while people are at work.

So, for the new study, researchers at the University of Birmingham and other universities began by recruiting sedentary office workers at the university. Potential volunteers were told that they would need to be available to walk for 30 minutes during their usual lunch hour three times a week.

Most of the resulting 56 volunteers were middle-aged women. It can be difficult to
attract men to join walking programmes, said Dr Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani, the study’s lead author and now a professor of exercise science at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Walking may not strike some men as strenuous enough to bother with, she said. But she and her colleagues did attract four sedentary middle-aged men to the experiment.

The volunteers completed a series of baseline health and fitness and mood tests at the outset of the experiment, revealing that they all were out of shape but otherwise generally healthy physically and emotionally. Thogersen-Ntoumani and her colleagues then randomly divided the volunteers into two groups, one of which was to begin a simple, 10-week walking programme right away, while the other control group would wait and start their walking programme 10 weeks later.

To allow them to assess people’s moods, the scientists helped their volunteers to set up a specialised app on their phones that included a list of questions about their emotions.

They wanted in-the-moment assessments from people of how they felt before and after exercise. The phone app questions provided that experience, Thogersen-Ntoumani said, in a relatively convenient form.

Then the first group began walking. Each volunteer was allowed to walk during one of several lunchtime sessions, all of them organised by a group leader and self-paced. Slower walkers could go together, with faster ones striding ahead. There was no formal prescribed distance or intensity for the walks. The only parameter was that they last for 30 minutes.

The groups met and walked three times a week. Each workday morning and noon during the first 10 weeks, the volunteers in both groups answered questions on their phones about their moods at that particular moment. After 10 weeks, the second group began their walking programme. The first group was allowed to continue walking or not as they chose.

Different answers

Then the scientists compared all of the responses, both between groups and within each individual person. In other words, they checked to see whether the group that had walked answered questions differently in the afternoon than the group that had not, and also whether individual volunteers answered questions differently on the afternoons when they had walked compared with when they had not.

The responses were substantially different when people had walked. On the afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably more enthusiastic, less tense, and generally more relaxed and able to cope than on afternoons when they hadn’t walked.

Although the authors did not directly measure workplace productivity in their study, “there is now quite strong research evidence that feeling more positive and enthusias-
tic at work is very important to productivity,” Thogersen-Ntoumani said. “So we would expect that people who walked at lunchtime would be more productive.” As a pleasant, additional outcome, all of the volunteers showed gains in their aerobic fitness and other measures of health at the completion of their 10 weeks of walking.

But, tellingly, many said that they anticipated being unable to continue walking after the experiment ended and a few  had had to drop out midway through the programme. The primary impediment to their walking, Thogersen-Ntoumani said, had been “that they were expected by management to work through lunch,” suggesting that management might wish to acquaint themselves with the latest science.