Walking Faster May Help Reverse Frailty

Encouraging older people to take it slowly might sound like reasonable advice, says Margaret Danilovich, a physical therapist and instructor at Northwestern University and an author of the new paper. “People tend to assume, ‘Someone is frail. We shouldn’t have them do too much,’” she says. But, she says, that’s a miscalculation, and older folks are capable of more than they might think.

In the current study, she and her colleagues set up exercise groups in 14 retirement homes. Research assistants assessed people’s frailty before and after the intervention and coached them during several months of weekly walking sessions in the retirement community hallways. Each group performed similar walking tasks—walking forward, backward, with walkers and without—but half of them walked casually, while the others were encouraged to walk much faster.