Walking slower? Your ears, not your knees, might be the problem

https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/hearing-loss-walking-speed-iphone-study-c53c482a

by marc__1 • 2 months ago

140 85 2 months ago

j4cobgarby• 2 months ago

Are problems with the ear the cause of this (i.e., the Problem), or just another symptom of a broader problem? My impression from the article is the latter.

kennywinker• 2 months ago

https://xkcd.com/552/ Seems appropriate

Ylpertnodi• 2 months ago

appropriate

Fair play for not using the word 'obligatory '.

AnthonBerg• 2 months ago

Exactly.

Oxidative stress is my unrelenting hunch.

(Frankly, it is ridiculous to me that doctors go around saying that fixing your hearing will free up your brain will fix your life. Fix the thing that's dragging down an expensive system that's wired straight into the sensorium and yep, you'll fix your other expensive systems like the brain.)

krackers• 2 months ago

Seems like the obvious confounding factor is just aging: Old people have problems with hearing, and old people are also less likely to walk briskly. The subset of people with undiagnosed hearing problems probably aren't taking care of their health in general.

huhkerrf2• 2 months ago

From the article:

Not only does walking speed typically decrease with age, greater levels of hearing loss are linked with slower walking speed for adults of all ages.

erelong• 2 months ago

https://archive.ph/m4P4K

m4633• 2 months ago

proprioception degrades with age, strength training is the counter.

(from "younger next year")

AnimalMuppet2• 2 months ago

Why strength training, instead of, say, ultimate frisbee or pickleball?

m4633• 2 months ago

made me wonder too, found: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4477923/

Key Points
- Improvements in joint position sense can be attained via standard strength-training exercises.
- Performing resistance exercises at consistent intensity rather than varying intensity resulted in better proprioception performance.

lc9er• 2 months ago

I'm a big fan of strength training, but think it too often gets suggested as the solution to every problem, when really, we need some mix of strength training, cardio (anything from walking, to martial arts or team sports, whatever you'll actually do), mobility, and balance training. Your cardio/activity, depending on your choice could, account for a lot of this.

djmips• 2 months ago

I am convinced that ultimate frisbee and pickleball also work. Another one is running or walking in nature, for example a beach - basically moving through an environment where the ground isn't flat.

ordersofmag• 2 months ago

Strength training can be done carefully with correct motions. Team sports with unpredictable dynamic movement not so much. Not to say you shouldn't engage in these, at any age, and that they have positive health benefits. They just aren't as safe as strength training for folks at the age where this is all relevant.

kakacik2• 2 months ago

One can be done in old age, with some care (or bodyweight variant), ultimate frisbee... I can't imagine, unless you mean just frisbee. More like recipe for injured joint.

browningstreet• 2 months ago

Resistance training. A thing even professional frisbee or pickleball player usually still supplement with, as well…

Systemic and muscular vitality is optimized when you get cardio, resistance, and bounding/dynamic movement. Heart, slow twitch, and fast twitch.

pnw• 2 months ago

Pickleball has a disproportionately high injury rate for people over 40. You'd be far better off taking up the gym or yoga.

euroderf• 2 months ago

I always at least skim every fitness article in the ny times, and there seems to be a consensus that at least for old farts (like me), strength training at some level brings a variety of health benefits.

gilbetron• 2 months ago

Sports are much more likely to result in injury, and as you get old, staying in the game (of life) is more important. It can take a long time to recover, if ever, from an injury as you age. I loved playing soccer, and did so until I was almost 50, but many of my issues, physically speaking, are from soccer. I loved doing it, and it is far more fun than strength training, but too many injuries result.

Strength training and controlled cardio is much better for continuous health.

fellowniusmonk• 2 months ago

Rollerblading has solved any issues I have, I cross train with about 30 mins of cycling 3-4 days a week too.

When you start skating older you have to pad up, I combined that with a slackboard and just standing on one leg with my eyes closed.

I went from feeling like an old man to now when I am basically impossible to knock over, my nervous system can catch me before I even realize it, at 15mph, when one foot strikes a rock, walking is now no problem, and sometimes I even sit on the floor without any old man groaning when I stand up.

Also, tall box step ups (like 2ft), which is very tall, no back risk like weighted bar workouts.

You have to pad up and go easy, it's a multi year process to get enough low impact reps up to build joint health, when you're older injuries are a real setback.

Rollerblading is like bouldering for your legs and feet at speed, very fun, with an infinite progression curve that you can train at your own pace.

pnut• 2 months ago

I walk slower and talk slower than I used to, and do both way slower than people I interact with.

I can appreciate things better by moving slowly, with more intention, conserving my concentration and energy for matters of substance.

Why must moving slowly be stigmatised?

I am surrounded by people talking at such a high rate, they start responding before the other person's sentence or thought is completely expressed.

My value at work has become disentangling messes made by people failing to communicate effectively, and the first step in addressing that problem is always, slow down.

You will not get 10% further in life by going 10% faster. People moving quickly, failed at planning. The entire mystery of the universe is accessible to you in your current location.

jgalt212• 2 months ago

Why must moving slowly be stigmatized?

Because, irrespective of your individual case, slowing down correlates strongly with ageing and diminished faculties.

kakacik2• 2 months ago

Unless, you do it on purpose for reasons parent described. Stupid teenagerish kneejerk reactions are common, as are ego moves like comparing against each other (frequently done by deeply insecure individuals), that doesn't mean they are a smart long term approach to life, regardless of age.

I am old enough to know they aren't. That doesn't mean I don't like walking fast if situation allows, but thats part of my continuous training, injury recovery, or active rest.

cassianoleal3• 2 months ago

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

CSSer• 2 months ago

I fully agree with you about communicating, but I’m not persuaded that translates to movement or is required for wisdom, which I think you’re broadly describing.

Physical movement can be joy. Dancing, running with children, playing sports with friends, and even just taking care of errands like cleaning so we can get on to enjoying our spaces with our friends and family are all benefits from being able to move and react faster. And I imagine any number of things will slow me down as I age, so I’ll take a +10% wherever I can get it!

andrelaszlo• 2 months ago

Being mindful is great. The article is just saying it's a health indicator:

So why does walking speed even matter? It’s considered an important indicator of overall health. A hale and hearty speed signifies that your body’s systems—including your heart, lungs, muscles and nervous system—are working well together. “We call it the sixth vital sign”

9991• 2 months ago

Why must moving slowly be stigmatised?

If you're quicker you can do more. I didn't have time to read the rest of your comment.

tombert2• 2 months ago

I don't think it should be "stigmatized", but I will say that walking slow actually hurts me. I love museums, but that slow "museum walking" will leave my back feeling extremely sore by the end of the day.

I feel like even if I covered the same distance (or longer) walking quickly, it wouldn't be nearly as painful.

elmomle• 2 months ago

I used to get lower back pain standing in concerts. For me, the pain had a lot to do with not properly engaging my glutes and core while standing still or moving slowly.

Yoga was very helpful--it taught me to use my muscles to carry my body rather than letting myself sink into my joints.

Groxx• 2 months ago

Yeah, I can walk at a moderate pace literally all day with no problems and be fine the next. Plodding for a couple hours brings pain and a lot of general discomfort, and I'm very patient in general - I would love to take my time with such things, but I can't. Gotta take breaks to walk faster or jog or something to recover.

kspacewalk22• 2 months ago

If you intentionally walk and talk slower than you used to, because of considered reasons, this article isn't about your kind of slowing down. It's about the involuntary kind, which isn't stigmatised any more than the mere act of acknowledging any other physical symptom.

sithadmin• 2 months ago

Why must moving slowly be stigmatised?

Because some of us have jobs to get to, trains to catch, appointments to make, airplane gates to queue at, and just generally need to get-things-done!

All for slowness, but not amongst pedestrians.

HerbManic3• 2 months ago

People walking much slower than everyone else the crowd are called Meanderthals.

I am in two minds on that.

Firstly, they should be a little more aware if others around them.

Second, why are we rushing everywhere? Why can't we just take it slow?

I cannot reconcile that other than a middle path between them.

loloquwowndueo2• 2 months ago

by people talking at such a high rate, they start responding before the other person's sentence or thought is completely expressed.

This is typical of people with ADHD. It also drives me up the wall :)

hattmall• 2 months ago

It's typical of all people, the average human response time for normal conversational flow is -500 ms.

jack_pp• 2 months ago

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast

ajkjk2• 2 months ago

Well, a slowing gait speed does strongly correlate with increasing mortality in the elderly: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3080184/

So we have to distinguish between walking slowly deliberately vs because one has trouble walking faster.

davnicwil• 2 months ago

There's a lot of truth in what you say but I think the conclusion you landed on is too broad.

There will exist people moving quickly who have failed to plan, but a lot also incorporate moving quickly as part of their plan, simply because that's how they prefer doing things.

It's true that this kind of planning is vulnerable to unexpected problems - a missed connection, a queue, whatever it might be - but over time it can still work out rational if you accept this risk and just want to spend less of your time in aggregate in transit, with spells of over-provisioned waiting time, or just prefer the experience of moving quickly (there is much said about the benefits of slowing down, less said about the equally valid disposition of finding flow in the act of moving quickly, which many people also experience).

yowayb• 2 months ago

Years ago I joined a spiritual workshop called The Art of Living in San Francisco. There was a lot of mindfulness, and the instructor followed the curriculum, except for one particular exercise.

The exercise was 2 parts. First, you put away your mat slowly. Second, you put it away quickly.

I immediately thought, oh wow this is interesting. We've spent all day on slow stuff, but now the curriculum has varied to show us that speed can also work when required. I began to think there was more depth to the workshop than I originally thought.

But she ended the exercise as soon as we did the 2nd part, and she clearly didnt like the exercise.

I don't personally believe that everything is better done slowly. A lot is, but there's no reason to banish speed.

locusofself• 2 months ago

Walking at a regular pace helps slow my brain down so that I can think more effectively. My favorite hobby right now is hour-long walks with my kindle (I walk in places where there are very long uninterrupted stretches).

When I read at home, I fall asleep in 2 pages. I have to be moving around. I have a bunch of "flashcard" like stuff on my kindle related to coding, interview prep, etc. The only chance I have is doing this while walking.

Petersipoi2• 2 months ago

The fact of the matter is that other people are likely annoyed by your slowness, and probably think lesser of you as a result, even if it's unjustified, and even if they're just doing it subconsciously. Sounds like you're aware of that and think it's worth the tradeoff. But you're probably not going to make much headway in destigmatising it. You're literally jumping in a bucket full of elderly people.

atoav2• 2 months ago

Being slow at times is a good thing and a freedom everybody should give themselves at times.

That being said, some people don't like being too slow. I have a collegue who is clearly too slow for health reasons (overweight/unfit). When we are walking to lunch too fast for him, his excuse sounds a lot like what you said, while clearly out of his breath, because of a lack of stamina. So he frames it as a choice where we are wrong, while he is out of breath on a medium tempo walk after 100m. When I know from personal talks with him, that he dislikes being the slow one.

The human body is built to move. A lot more than most modern people move during their typical days. Not moving it, or moving it in ways that avoid effort has serious health effects. That doesn't mean we have to move fast always, but if your reason for not moving fast is an inability to do so, that is bad both for your body and for your mental capacity.

Moving slowly can be very exhausting. Try holding out you arm in front of you for a minute. So for many this isn't about moving slowly, it is about moving lazily.

Talking about responding too fast: Yes listening is a key skill many people fail to deploy. Yet effective communication sometimes works way differently than just listening to the words someone said. Here I have to think about another friend of mine. She talks very slowly and has the habbit of talking in circles. Meaning if you won't eventually interrupt her, you will hear variations of the same thought that has been expressed in the first 10 seconds spread out over minutes. This happens even with things where the first thing she said was a yes/no question you could answer in a second. A surprising amount of people will just talk until you interrupt them. In fact they want you to interrupt them, it stresses them out if you leave them hanging to fill more time. Those people would just have to get to the point, but they seem to have an inability to do so.

Effective communication after the sender/message/receiver model happens if the receiver can quickly decode the original thought encoded into the message (=words) by the sender. Old couples for example will not have to say many words in order for the other to understand what they feel and want to express. It is like they read each others mind, because communication isn't about reading the message and interpreting the words objectively, it is about decoding the thoughts, feelings and intentions encoded in the message made in the circumstances it was made.

That can lead to complications, if person A understands person B quickly, but person B doesn't trust person A to do so. Then person B needlessly insists on elaborating until the point is reached where sufficient information has been packed into the message to get the thought across. That means person B has a mental model of how person A may understand certain words that is way to pessimistic. For bad communicators that mental model is overly broad and unpersonalized ("throw words at the other side at some point they will understand"), while good communicators can quickly form and refine their understanding of how the other side receives messages. In the best case that works like with the old couple. In the worst case someone convinced themselves they can read minds, while all they do is guess and interrupt.

That means being interrupted can mean a person thinks they understood what you were saying. If this happens often and the person opposite gets it right, that is a sign they understand you well. If it happens often and the person opposite gets you wrong, either your thoughts feel more complex to you than they are or you need to work on the way you encode the thoughts into words (e.g. lead with the least obvious thought to avoid them hooking onto the first thing).

HerbManic3• 2 months ago

I have always found those that move and talk slower tend to be the ones that are more considered. They are not in a rush so they get it all done right.

I always found it funny the speeches of Alan watts is just how slow he generally talked, and yet that didn't mean the message was slow.

I also find it funny that there are loads of AI copies of him and they are all racing through the script as they cannot grasp his slower cadence.

justonceokay2• 2 months ago

When I started talking more slowly I started realizing who actually listens.

m3kw9• 2 months ago

is it because you use more of your focus to try to hear things so you walk slower.

cubefox• 2 months ago

There is also a correlation between walking pace and IQ. See e.g. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

rickcarlino• 2 months ago

My mom is several years into Alzheimer’s and is at a point where she requires our help for nearly every daily task. She got a hearing aid put in last year and at the same time, she walks so slowly we often need to bring a wheelchair with us to get daily tasks done when she is around. There is definitely something going on here.

wingspar• 2 months ago

My mother had bad knees before dementia took her mentally so always walked slow, we have friends who’s parents had no walking problems and were ‘escape risks’.

A walker might help as slowness is sometimes due to fear of falling.

My mother used a wheeled walker with hand brakes for several years before we switched her to the no-wheel kind.

quaintdev• 2 months ago

https://archive.is/m4P4K

Hoodedcrow2• 2 months ago

I don't have hearing problems, but I have noticed I arrive at places quicker when I don't have headphones on. Sadly this doesn't happen often because I'm low-key addicted.

luqtas• 2 months ago

mom always joke i look like a 100 year old guy when i'm walking around the neighbor. i'm always listening to a podcast about science in a non-native language so a lot of mental workload goes into it

i have quite long legs and i outpace by a far cry everyone when i'm walking around the city without my earbuds or when i'm hiking

hokkos• 2 months ago

An obvious confounding factor is age, did they accounted for this?

huhkerrf2• 2 months ago

From the article:

Not only does walking speed typically decrease with age, greater levels of hearing loss are linked with slower walking speed for adults of all ages.

Why is it every time there's a study posted to HN, someone feels the need to go in and say, "Have the researchers thought of $incredibly_obvious_thing?"

drfloyd51• 2 months ago

Don’t know. Did you ever consider that HN appeals to intelligent people who like to ask questions before they read the whole article?

compiler-devel• 2 months ago

Because HN is little more than a Reddit exclave.

gblargg• 2 months ago

Yes, they did account for age.

harel• 2 months ago

I find walking slowly quite difficult. I feel like I'm putting more effort to balance myself slowly and all in all it feels less stable than just "walking" at a moderate to brisk rate. I wonder if this is the same category of problem just in reverse...

miladyincontrol• 2 months ago

The problem isnt people's walking speed, its people who walk unpredictably specifically with zero spacial awareness.

Hnrobert42• 2 months ago

I have heard them called meanderthals.

justonceokay2• 2 months ago

Seems like an anger issue on your part. People are not obliged to move in ways aligned with your narrative

jrhizor• 2 months ago

This style of clickbait headline feels very out of place on HN

Ngraph• 2 months ago

n=1 here, but I've been wearing a back brace for lumbar pain and walking has slowed noticeably. Pretty confident it's the back, not the ears.

Every body part wants in on this study.

protocolture• 2 months ago

Its because I can hear the noise my knees are making.

atoav2• 2 months ago

My brother had a heavy knee injury during his youth. His doctor said he can forget doing sport. Last year he ran a mountainman (full marathon with a descent of 1200m).

He read more into the topic and figured that it is mostly a question of training. Since in my family many do sports, I have seen this many times: have an issue with some joint, back, whatever? Unless you broke a bone or have an open wound that typically means you need to find the right training to get over it.

Usually the worst is not moving at all.

ramon156• 2 months ago

I grew up in a household where talking fast meant you won the conversation. Interrupting people was part of that.

When I am with friends, I much prefer taking the time to listen to them, ask follow-up questions. Turns out this is the bare minimum, but it made me appreciate the conversations a lot more.

Talking with family is impossible because, the moment my words are not part of their thought process, they will interrupt me, or just pretend they're distracted.

Walking slower? Your ears, not your knees, might be the problem

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