Older adults do not have a higher metabolic cost than younger adults in outdoor overground walking

The metabolic cost of walking is widely used to evaluate human performance and effectiveness of clinical interventions. Decades of laboratory research, largely based on treadmill experiments, have established a canonical relationship between walking speed and metabolic cost, and suggested that ageing shifts this relationship upward, implying reduced efficiency in older adults. However, this relationship has not been well tested during overground walking across matched speeds. We compared healthy younger (n=16; 26±2yr) and older (n=11; 74±3yr) adults across eight outdoor overground walking trials at different speeds: preferred walking speed (PWS), three fixed speeds (0.8, 1.2, 1.6 m·s⁻¹), and four speeds at ±5% and ±10% of PWS. Contrary to our hypothesis, older adults did not show higher gross or net metabolic cost of walking (GCOW and NCOW) than younger adults at any speed; rather, both trended consistently lower in older adults, reaching significance for GCOW at 0.8 m·s⁻¹ only. Comparisons of resting metabolic rate and respiratory exchange ratio to prior reference groups did not indicate that our older cohort was unusually fit. Independent of age, GCOW was significantly higher at 0.8 m·s⁻¹ than at the remaining speeds (1.2-1.6 m·s⁻¹), confirming that walking at slower speeds increases GCOW. These findings challenge the view that ageing intrinsically increases the energetic cost of walking, suggesting instead that previously reported upward shifts in cost may reflect treadmill-specific constraints or speed effects. Future work is needed to explore direct comparisons of outdoor, overground walking with treadmill walking at fixed speeds in both younger and older adults.