Do you have an activity tracker? And do you find yourself, toward the end of the day, looking anxiously at your wrist, realizing you haven’t taken 10,000 steps, and start walking around the house, swinging your arms in a desperate attempt to reach that magical goal? That’s what I started doing when I first got an activity tracker, until my wife, Clare, told me it was getting really annoying.
The 10,000 step figure was originally the product of a 1960s marketing campaign in Japan. One company, eager to sell its pedometers, came up with a device they called Manpo-Kei, which translates to “10,000 step meter.”
Since then, there has been lots of trying to come up with a scientifically based figure for the number of steps you need take to achieve a long and healthy life. One of the most recent attempts was published in the lancet in March 2022. It was a meta-analysis of 15 international cohort studies, involving more than 50,000 people from four continents.
What they found was the number of steps you needed to take depended on your age. For adults age 60 and older (I’m 65), the risk of premature death leveled off between 6,000 and 8,000 steps per day, and taking more steps provided no additional benefit for longevity. Adults under the age of 60 needed to aim for 8,000-10,000 steps.
This is kind of interesting, but to be honest, I ditched my activity tracker to make sure I get in a couple of 20-minute brisk walks a day. That’s because of a podcast I did on the benefits of taking a brisk walk early in the morning, as part of my popular Just one thing series, which you can find on BBC Sounds. It’s also partly due to an experiment I did with Professor Rob Copeland of Sheffield Hallam University.
The goal was to compare the benefits and ease of doing 10,000 steps with something called ‘Active 10’. With Active 10 you don’t need to count steps, your goal is to do three 10-minute brisk walks a day.
We gathered a small group of volunteers, put activity monitors on them, and then divided them into two groups. One group was asked to reach the 10,000 step goal and the other to do three Active 10 sessions, which adds up to about 3,000 steps a day. We asked them to do this for a week. The group that asked to do 10,000 steps struggled, while the Active 10 group said they found it relatively easy.
When Copeland analyzed data from the volunteers’ monitors, he found that the Active 10 group had done 30 percent more “moderate-to-vigorous physical activity” than the 10,000-step group, even though they moved for less time. This is important, because it’s when you move quickly that you get the most health benefits.
To start getting Active 10 in your day, go to the NHS website where you can download a free app. It’s a good way to see how much brisk walking you do and how to get more done.
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