This 5-second walking test can tell you how well you’re aging

How fast can you walk?

It only takes about five seconds to get a sense of how well you’re aging.

Stand up. Stretch out. And get ready to walk your hardest.

The 6-meter walk test has become a key vital sign that clinicians working in longevity clinics worldwide use to track their patients’ fitness and longevity.

Dr. Sara Bonnes, medical director of the Healthy Longevity Clinic at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, said her team runs 6-meter walking tests on all of the patients that come to the clinic “as a marker of their functional performance.”

“It tells me how well people are functioning, how well their muscles are moving and working together,” Bonnes told B-17. “We can do complex tests to measure how well people’s physical fitness level is, but this is a smaller, easier version that still tells me: are you moving well and getting around well for your age?”

Doctors may also perform longer versions of this same test. There’s a 6-minute walk test that many clinicians perform, but it requires a good amount of runway.

“You need a relatively flat, open, straight space so people aren’t going in circles and getting dizzy or tripping over obstacles,” Bonnes said.

Fortunately, researchers have discovered that both 6-meter walk test results and 6-minute walk test results are fairly reliable indicators of a person’s functional fitness.

Here’s how the 6-meter walk test works:

Six meters is nearly 20 feet.

• Measure out a 6-meter stretch of straight, flat ground.

At Bonnes’s clinic, they use a hallway and mark the beginning and the end of the path with orange cones. But if you’re eyeballing this at home, 6 meters is about 19.68 feet. You can use a tape measure or the measuring tool on your phone.

• Give yourself about 2 warm-up meters before the start line to get up to speed.

This test is meant to measure your very fastest walking pace, so give yourself a little head start to get going.

• Have a friend use a stopwatch or timer to time your 6-meter walk.

They should only time the test, not the warm-up.

• Do the walk!

Record your time so you can reference it again later.

I tried it

Time to hoof it! Dr. Bonnes kept time for me on her phone.

I tried the test out with Bonnes as my timekeeper.

She told me I walk 3.14 meters per second because I completed the test in 1.91 seconds. That is faster than average for my age group, and certainly breezier than most of her patients in their 60s, 70s, or 80s.

Still, she said there are things I can do to fortify my body against unnecessary damage.

“Having a sedentary job, getting arthritis, all of those things can impact how we move and how well we function,” Bonnes said.

Working on walking speed may help to offset those effects. Scientists think that brisk walking may even help keep the protective caps on the ends of our DNA chromosomes, called telomeres, in better repair. And while the old 10,000 steps-per-day rule is little more than a marketing gimmick, it is true that more walking is associated with more health, up to a point.

The 6-meter walking test is “really better for older patients,” Bonnes said. But if someone has a low score for their age, “then we work on exercise and build up that muscle mass.”