How Many Steps Do You Really Need to Take Every Day, According to Science
The more you walk, the lower your risk of all-cause mortality and cancer, with the benefits leveling off once you reach 10,000 steps a day, according to a new study . It is so clear that this is the number of steps to strive for – or not?
Studies that compare health outcomes to step count sound pretty compelling because these days, we all have step counters on our wrists or in our pockets. The number of steps also sounds very specific and precise: 10,000 steps equals health and happiness, and it is automatically measured for us. Chill.
But I bet you’ve already noticed a few important caveats. Our bodies are dirty meat machines, not neat step-counters. If exercise matters, wouldn’t a cyclist have fewer steps than a runner and still be just as healthy? For that matter, can’t a walker and a runner end up having the same number of steps despite exercising at very different intensities, which likely affect the body differently?
On the other hand, there are some ways in which step counting is a good way to track activity, so I don’t want to dismiss the idea entirely, although I’m skeptical about how clear a picture it provides . Step counts are higher in people who move more in daily life (sometimes called casual activity), even if they don’t do a lot of structured exercise. Steps are also automatically counted: you may not remember if you worked in the yard for 20 minutes or 45, but your tracker probably knows how many steps you took.
There are a few more caveats: these studies are usually observational in nature. They tell us that people who take more steps a day tend to be healthier. But is it a cause or an effect? People with poor health may have less energy to run errands and take daily walks. And people who use wheelchairs or other means of transportation probably don’t count steps even when they do.
With that in mind, here are some of the step counts published in a recent study, as well as some of their caveats.
For all-cause mortality and cancer mortality
This study showed that people who walked 10,000 steps had a lower risk than those who took 8,000, those who in turn had a lower risk than those who took 6,000, and so on. Counting steps above 10,000 seemed to have the same risk as 10,000. In other words, if this represents a true and causal relationship that we cannot be sure of, an increase from 10,000 to 12,000 is not will change your risk of cancer or death.
Tracked 78,500 UK people aged 40 to 79, 97% of whom are white.
For dementia
This study found that participants’ risk of dementia decreased as they took more steps, up to 9,800 steps per day, as in the previous study. (The survey was also conducted by the same team and with the same subjects.) They also note that people who walk 3,800 steps have about half the risk of people who walk 9,800 steps, so maybe that lower number would be a good target. . if you currently lead a sedentary lifestyle. However, this was also an observational study and most of the participants were a little too young to have developed dementia.
All-cause mortality in older women
This study showed a reduced risk of death from any cause in women who took 4,400 steps compared to those who took 2,700 steps a day. More was better, up to about 7500 steps, after which the chance of death seemed to level off. Step count numbers come from quartiles: the 25% of people with the fewest steps average around 2,700.
The participants were 16,741 women with a mean age of 72 years. They came from the Women’s Health Study, which began in the 1990s as a trial of aspirin and vitamins to prevent heart disease and cancer. The participants are 95% white and most of them are nurses.
For mortality in middle-aged people
This study compared steps per day with the risk of death in middle age (41 to 65 years). It turned out that people who took more than 7,000 steps had a 50-70% lower risk of mortality than people who took less than 7,000 steps a day. This number was chosen as the threshold because it is the number the American College of Sports Medicine estimates as walking 30 minutes each day plus a small amount of non-exercise activity.
The 2,110 participants were 57% female, 42% black, and were followed for an average of about 11 years after the study.
For arterial stiffness
Arterial stiffness is a component of cardiovascular disease. This systematic review found that increasing the number of steps by 2,000 per day reduced arterial stiffness by about the same amount as starting a structured exercise program. The categories compared in the analysis ranged from those who took less than 5,000 steps to those who took more than 10,000 steps. The authors write, “In layman’s terms, these results show that little physical activity is better than nothing, but also that more is better than less.”
The results are from 20 previous studies. Most were crossover (comparing groups of people based on how many steps they took), but some were randomized controlled trials or prospective studies.
For Diabetes Risk in Hispanic Adults
This study showed that every additional 1,000 steps per day reduced the risk of developing diabetes by 2%. People who took 10,000 to 12,000 steps a day had an 18% lower risk than those who took fewer than 5,000 steps a day.
The study participants were 6,634 Hispanic and Latino adults, half of them women, with an average age of 39 years.
Mortality from all causes, but at different ages
This study is interesting in that it breaks down the results by age group. Data from 15 studies show that mortality decreases with increasing step count to 6,000-8,000 steps for people aged 60 and over, but the equivalent in younger people is 8,000-10,000 steps.
What do we make of all this?
I think it would be a mistake to take these top results at face value. Can you reduce your risk of death by a certain percentage simply by consciously taking a few thousand more steps a day? Nearly all of these studies compared people who had already walked a different number of steps, rather than challenging groups of people to increase their step count and see how their health changed.
But the results show that healthier people tend to have step counts closer to the upper end of the typical range. In almost all of these studies (and others in this area of research), people who take, say, 8,000 steps tend to be at lower risk than those who take, say, 2,000 steps. So, if you’re currently sedentary, it might be worth trying increasing your step count, even if there’s no specific study that says you should hit that number.
I also think it’s interesting to see that there is no specific optimal number that has been identified in these studies, although we like to talk about these studies in detail. You don’t need to hit 10,000 because something different will happen than if you hit 9,500.
The curves on the graphs in these articles tend to flatten out somewhere in the high four digits, but here, too, the estimates become less accurate because not many people take more steps than that. For example, a person who regularly takes 25,000 steps a day is going through the roof. They may be in great shape, or they may have an active job that forces them to work more than they can easily recover; these studies are not designed to tell the difference.
The bottom line is what you probably assumed before checking the numbers: if you sit a lot, moving more will probably do you good. And if you need specific recommendations, you can stick to the good old 150+ minutes of exercise per week, or follow the various government project guidelines that recommend 8,500 steps a day (US president’s challenge), 7,000 to 10,000 (UK national obesity problem). ). forum) or 8,000 to 10,000 (Japan).