The walking technique now marketed worldwide as “Nordic walking” began as an off-season training habit for Finnish cross-country skiers, who used their poles on dry ground to keep their conditioning up between snow seasons. In 1966, Leena Jääskeläinen, a physical education lecturer at the University of Jyväskylä, formalised the idea into a teachable technique she called sauvakävely, pole walking, and gave the first public demonstration of it at Tampere’s Finlandia Walk event in 1987, according to a history of the sport published in the Journal of Education, Health and Sport. The Finnish pole manufacturer Exel coined the international marketing name “Nordic Walking” only in the mid-1990s, decades after the technique itself had already been in use.
That history matters for anyone encountering pole walking through a wellness trend rather than its origins: this is a genuinely Finnish invention, not a marketing label attached after the fact to ordinary walking. What the research says about whether it actually helps older adults avoid falls is more complicated, and more honest, than most of the enthusiastic coverage suggests.
What one controlled trial actually found
A 2019 randomized clinical trial published in PLOS ONE set out to test a straightforward hypothesis: that eight weeks of Nordic walking training would improve functional mobility, balance, and quality of life in untrained older adults more than eight weeks of ordinary, unaided walking. Thirty-three sedentary older adults were randomly assigned to a Nordic walking group (16 people, average age 64.6) or a free walking group (17 people, average age 68.6), matched for the same training load.
The result was not what the researchers expected. Both groups improved, in walking speed, quality of life, and static balance, but Nordic walking did not outperform ordinary walking on the study’s primary measure. The researchers were direct about this in their own conclusion, stating plainly that their hypothesis was not supported. This is one trial, with a modest sample size, and it measured general balance and mobility rather than actual fall rates over time, so it cannot settle the broader question on its own. But it is a real, honestly reported result, and it complicates any claim that walking with poles is simply superior to walking without them.
Where the poles plausibly still make a difference
What the PLOS ONE trial did not directly test is the specific mechanical claim that makes Nordic walking relevant to fall prevention in the first place. Dr. Mohammed Auais, a physiotherapist and researcher at Queen’s University who studies falls and fear of falling in older adults, explains the reasoning behind that claim in a university feature on his ongoing research: using poles gives a walker four points of contact with the ground instead of two, widening their base of support in a way that can make a stride feel more stable in the moment, separate from whatever it does to underlying balance measured in a lab.
Dr. Auais and colleagues are running a randomized controlled pilot trial, still ongoing as of this writing, specifically testing Nordic walking’s feasibility and safety among older adults who are at risk of falling or who have already developed a fear of falling, a distinct and consequential problem in its own right: fear of falling can make people more sedentary, which in turn raises their actual fall risk over time. This pilot is explicitly a feasibility study, meant to establish whether a larger trial is workable, not a completed result proving Nordic walking prevents falls. It has not yet reported outcome data on fall rates.
Two claims that are easy to blur together
It is worth keeping two separate claims apart here. The first is that Nordic walking improves general fitness, posture, and muscle engagement more than walking without poles, a claim with a more mixed evidence base than commonly assumed, given the PLOS ONE trial’s null result on its primary comparison. The second is that the wider base of support poles provide could plausibly reduce fall risk specifically, independent of whatever it does to broader measures of balance. That second claim is mechanically reasonable and is exactly what Dr. Auais’s ongoing trial is designed to test directly, but it has not yet been confirmed by a completed study measuring actual falls.
What this does not settle
None of this means pole walking is not worth trying. Both groups in the PLOS ONE trial improved meaningfully over eight weeks, which suggests that structured, regular walking of any kind is doing real work for sedentary older adults, poles or no poles. And a technique that gives a person more confidence in their own stride, whatever the underlying mechanism, has value that a balance-platform measurement does not fully capture; the Queen’s University team notes that patients who are reluctant to use a cane or walker because of its stigma are often more willing to try walking poles instead, which alone may translate into more consistent physical activity.
What the current evidence does not support is the more sweeping version of the claim, that pole walking has been proven superior to ordinary walking for preventing falls in older adults. The honest state of the research is that regular walking training of some kind reliably helps, the specific mechanical case for poles reducing fall risk is plausible and currently being tested directly, and no completed trial has yet closed that particular loop.