Japanese Interval Walking: What Is It and Can It Help With Exercise
Amy Glover said she tried nearly everything to reach her goal of 10,000 steps a day. However, no matter what she did, whether it was treadmill interval sessions, taking a walk at lunchtime, or VO2 max training, which measures the amount of oxygen the body consumes during exercise, she only averaged around 6,500 steps per day.
Glover, a lifestyle writer for HuffPost UK, said that her “ongoing attempts to hit the 10k target have proven unsuccessful and inconvenient.”
One day, Glover read about something called “Japanese walking,” developed by Professor Hiroshi Nose and Associate Professor Shizue Masuki at Shinshu University in Matsumoto, Japan.
This technique, also known as “the 3-3 walking workout,” requires walking for three minutes at a fast pace and then slowly for another three minutes. This is repeated five times for a 30-minute workout.
Glover tried the workout and said she never found walking to be easier or more fun.
“It’s safe to say I’m never going back,” Glover wrote in an article for HuffPost UK.
Walking is one of the most convenient forms of exercise there is because you can do it anywhere and at any time. However, Japanese interval walking offers more benefits than traditional walking and has become a global trend that offers numerous health benefits.
This form of walking alternates between bursts of high-intensity walking and periods of low-intensity (recovery) walking for 30 minutes. Japanese interval walking has been the subject of numerous scientific studies and is considered one of the most effective walking techniques for people of all ages, including older adults.
Although the interval walking study, led by Nose and Masuki, was published in 2007, the technique is seeing a resurgence after going viral on TikTok.
The 2007 study found that older adults who did high-intensity interval walking had lower blood pressure, stronger thigh muscles, and better aerobic capacity than walkers the same age who walked at a more moderate, continuous pace.
Participants in the interval walking training (IWT) study did three minutes of fast walking followed by three minutes at a slower pace for 30 minutes per day, at least four days per week.
“One of the most surprising findings was that IWT markedly increased physical fitness and decreased blood pressure after the 5-month intervention, whereas these improvements were not observed in the moderate-intensity continuous walking group,” Masuki, a researcher on the team and professor at Shinshu University Graduate School of Medicine in Matsumoto, told The Washington Post.
IWT got its nickname because the study was done in Japan, but the walking technique isn’t necessarily more popular in Japan than anywhere else, Masuki said.
How to Tell if You’re Walking Too Fast or Slow
Since this technique is unlike walking at a steady pace, how do walkers know if they’re going fast or slow enough to get the benefits from this workout?
Dr Kristian Karstoft, an associate professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Copenhagen, who has studied the method, explains how.
“The fast walking pace is typically fast [enough] that you are not able to speak in long sentences,” Dr. Karstoft told The Guardian. “And then the slow intervals are so slow that you are able to recover.” He added that people often find it difficult to walk slowly enough during these intervals.
Dr. Karstoft said this technique is especially suitable for people prone to running injuries since walking is less stressful on the joints, and for middle-aged and older adults who do not exercise regularly. People who were already pretty fit, he said, would need to jog or run in intervals to get similar benefits.
Dr. Karstoft, who also conducted a small randomized controlled trial on IWT, also published a review on the topic. Dr. Karstoft and his colleagues concluded that Japanese interval walking was a feasible and effective training regimen for older, fragile people. “It significantly enhances fitness, muscle strength, and health markers,” they wrote.
Recent Studies Report More Health Benefits From Interval Walking
More studies on interval walking have been published since Nose’s and Masuki’s report was released nearly two decades ago. One study, published in 2023 in PLoS One, involved 51 adults with Type 2 diabetes, aged 20-80 years, who participated in IWT for 20 weeks and showed improvements in cholesterol, BMI, flexibility, and oxygen intake.
A 2024 study investigated whether high-intensity interval walking had a more positive effect on physical function and overall health in older adults compared to moderate-intensity continuous walking. Participants aged 65 and older were randomly assigned to either high-intensity interval walking, alternating every three minutes, or moderate-intensity walking exercise for 30 minutes three times a week for eight weeks.
The study, published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science, found that high-intensity interval walking had positive effects on cardiorespiratory endurance, flexibility, and other physical functions.
“When you increase your intensity of walking or other exercise that raises your heart rate, it’s helpful to cardiovascular health and increases aerobic capacity,” Mir Ali, a general and bariatric surgeon and medical director of Memorial Care Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, Calif., told The Washington Post. “It puts healthy stress on the heart, which increases its capacity to function better and decreases resting blood pressure. Once you’re settled down from that increase, over time, your blood pressure improves.”
Masuki reported that her team’s further research found that the walking technique also helps with sleep, thinking, and depression.
With the low and high intensity that it offers, IWT is more “doable than walking at an intense pace all the time, Masuki said. What’s even better is that people are more than likely to continue doing the exercise.
Masuki recalled a time when her research team instructed a group of middle-aged and older participants to walk nonstop at high intensity for 30 minutes a day.
“However, no one completed the program, and they complained that the program was too boring and too difficult,” Masuki told The Washington Post.
Without a doubt, interval walking has been a game-changer for Glover, who writes: “I walk more often, enjoy the time more (I think that the three-minute-on, three-minute-off approach makes the exercise go by much faster), and have even upped my step average by a couple of thousand per day.”
Source Links:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/japanese-walking-method-benefits_uk_68873afbe4b0b306e5bb55da
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/just-30-minutes-day-japanese-172054872.html?guccounter=1
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/aug/09/japanese-interval-walking-the-viral-exercise-trend-that-could-put-a-spring-in-your-step?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10194951/#abstract1
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39347269/
