Community dog-walking schemes might provide the key to helping adults stay active, researchers in Norfolk, UK, say today.
A major study in the county has found "amazing" effects from dog ownership.
Researchers said they were surprised at the extent to which dog-walkers are more active than others – even though they expected differences.
They report that on cold, wet and dark winter days dog-walkers are more active than other people are on long, sunny and warm summer days.
The findings, involving more than 3,000 pensioners, are reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The researchers say that exercise on prescription programmes could suggest dog ownership or use community dog-walking schemes.
Researcher Dr Yu-Tzu Wu, from the University of East Anglia, said: "We know that physical activity levels decline as we age, but we’re less sure about the most effective things we can do to help people maintain their activity as they get older.
"We found that dog walkers were much more physically active and spent less time sitting overall.
"We expected this, but when we looked at how the amount of physical activity participants undertook each day varied by weather conditions, we were really surprised at the size of the differences between those who walked dogs and the rest of the study participants."
Fellow researcher Professor Andy Jones said: "Physical activity interventions typically try and support people to be active by focussing on the benefits to themselves, but dog walking is also driven by the needs of the animal.
"Being driven by something other than our own needs might be a really potent motivator and we need to find ways of tapping into it when designing exercise interventions in the future."
Dog ownership supports the maintenance of physical activity during poor weather in older English adults: cross-sectional results from the EPIC Norfolk cohort Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 25 July 2017; doi 10.1136/jech-2017-208987 [abstract]
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