Outdoor walk groups (OWGs)
AIDS
Twelve OWGs were delivered in total. Sites engaged a total of 7 OWG leaders and 17 OWG assistants throughout the study. All leaders and assistants received and were asked to review the detailed week by week facilitator guide; each leader was required to use the document for reference throughout the study. Six of the seven (86%) OWG leaders attended the training session.Two OWGs conducted all 20 (100%) planned sessions, 8 groups ran 17–19 (85–95%) sessions, 1 group conducted 16 (80%) sessions and 1 group ran 14 (70%) sessions. Reasons for cancelled sessions included rain (79.2%), poor air quality (12.5%), and high winds (8.3%).The percentage of OWG sessions in which each of the five planned activity components was delivered was: warm-up 98.9%, first continuous distance walk 98.5%, walking skills 97.6%, second continuous distance walk 95.2%, cool down 97.1%.Across all sites, we collected activity monitor/GPS data on 62 participants in week 3 and 59 participants in week 9. All people who attended one of the days in week 3 and 9 were evaluated. There were many more participants with baseline gait speeds ≥ 0.8 m/s (We compared mean outdoor walking speed achieved at week 3 and week 9 with baseline comfortable gait speed derived from the 10mWT test completed indoors. Results are presented in Table Walking speeds indoors and outdoorsMean (SD)
Table Distance, speed and duration of continuous distance walks in week 3 and 9 of outdoor walk groupTable includes 43 participants who had accelerometry and GPS data for walk 1 and walk 2 at both week 3 and 9
During the week 5 session which included a long continuous distance walk with Nordic Poles, the overall mean pooled percentage of participants who attended the OWGs and used Nordic poles was 73.9%. Individual session use of Nordic poles in week 5 varied from 0–100%. Participants who did not use the poles had a variety of reasons. Some participants did not like using Nordic Poles and in some cases, the walk group leaders may have decided that walking poles were not safe for some participants who used walking aids, such as a walker.