At Monday Club just 30% of the members are men. The women say it's because the men are kidding themselves and in denial. They will die younger.
Here is a test. As a man, are you walking strongly and at speed or are you slowing down with a shorter pace and perhaps even with your feet slightly wider apart?
Most women, until late in life, walk with purpose. Most men don’t.
Your walking speed (gait speed) is a strong, reliable predictor of life expectancy and overall health, effectively acting as a “report card” for your heart, lungs, muscles, and brain.
Walking requires the complex, simultaneous integration of multiple organ systems. If any single system is experiencing underlying damage, strain, or accelerated ageing, it shows up immediately as a slower gait.
Doctors often call walking speed the “sixth vital sign” (alongside blood pressure, pulse, respiration, temperature, and pain).
High Energy Demands
Walking is an active, energy-consuming process. To move forward efficiently, your body relies heavily on your heart, lungs, and circulatory system to pump oxygen-rich blood to working muscles.
A slower pace often signals underlying cardiovascular decline, poor lung capacity, or subclinical heart disease that has not yet been formally diagnosed.
Neurological Coordination
A smooth, steady stride requires continuous, rapid communication between your brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves.
Your brain must process visual cues, maintain balance, and coordinate muscle firing patterns simultaneously.
Structural changes in the brain (such as silent micro-strokes, white matter lesions, or early neurodegenerative changes) subtly disrupt these pathways, slowing you down years before cognitive symptoms like memory loss appear.
Muscle Mass and Skeletal Integrity
Walking requires a baseline level of muscle mass, strength, and joint health.
A slowing pace is a direct indicator of sarcopenia (the age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and quality). Loss of strength makes it harder to propel your body forward and increases the metabolic effort required to take a single step.
Systemic Inflammation and Energy Production
Maintaining a brisk pace requires efficient mitochondrial function – the tiny powerhouses in your cells that generate energy.
Chronic, low-grade systemic inflammation (often called “inflammaging”) damages mitochondria and accelerates cellular ageing. This biological fatigue directly translates to a sluggish physical pace.
The "Reserve" Factor
When you face an acute illness, injury, or stressor, your body draws upon its physiological “reserves” to recover. A fast walking speed indicates deep biological reserves.
Conversely, a slow gait reveals that your body is already working near its maximum capacity just to perform daily tasks, leaving very few resources available to fight off a future infection, surgery, or fall.
What speed to target: 1 km in 14 minutes
A comfortable walking speed of about 1 km in 22 minutes aligns with average life expectancy.
Walking at 1 km in 14 minutes or faster predicts longer-than-average or “exceptional” life expectancy.
If it takes you 25 minutes to walk 1 km, you have a 12% higher risk of an early death.
Can you improve your walking? Yes.
It is not hard or complex. All you have to do is improve your lower body muscle strength and start moving – that creates joint flexibility and balance.
At Monday Club we advise 9 weeks for people, especially blokes, to establish the muscles and a new habit of exercise.
We guarantee that you will be markedly stronger and if not, we will simply return all your money. (We haven’t had to return any yet).
So men, join the women and win back years of your life and, just as importantly, win back all the things you enjoy about living.
