How Many Steps You Really Need to Take Each Day, According to Science

The more you walk, the lower your risk of all-cause and cancer mortality, according to a new study, and the benefits level off once you hit 10,000 steps per day. Clearly, that’s the number of steps to aim for, isn’t it?

Studies comparing health outcomes to step counting sound pretty convincing, because these days we all have step counters on our wrists or Yoin our pockets. A step count number also sounds very concrete and precise: 10,000 steps equals health and happiness, and is measured for us automatically. Cool.

But by now, I bet you’ve noticed some important caveats. Our bodies are messy meat machines, not clean step counters. If exercise is what matters, wouldn’t a cyclist have fewer steps than a runner and yet be just as healthy? In fact, couldn’t a walker and a runner end up with a similar step count despite exercising at vastly different intensities that are likely to have different effects on the body?

On the other hand, there are a few ways step counting is a good way to track activity, so I don’t want to rule the idea out entirely, even though i’m skeptical about the sharpness of the image it provides. Step counts are higher for people who move more in daily life (“incidental” activity, it’s sometimes called) even if they don’t get much structured exercise. Steps are also counted automatically: YYou may not remember whether you were gardening for 20 minutes or 45, but your tracker probably has a good idea of ​​how many steps you took.

There is an additional set of caveats: TThese studies are usually observational. They tell us that people who take more steps a day tend to be healthier. But is it cause or effect? People who have health problems may have less energy to run errands and go for a walk every day. And people who use wheelchairs or other mobility aids probably don’t count steps, even when they do.

With that in mind, here are some step counts published in recent research, alongside some of their caveats.

For all-cause mortality and cancer mortality

This study found that people who took 10,000 steps had lower risk than those who took 8,000, who in turn had lower risk than those who took 6,000, and so on. Step counts above 10,000 seemed to have similar risk as 10,000. In other words, if this represents a true causal relationship, which we can’t be sure about, then increasing it from 10,000 to 12,000 wouldn’t change your risk. of cancer or death.

The 78,500 people tracked were from the UK, aged between 40 and 79, and 97% were white.

for dementia

This studio found that participants’ dementia risk decreased the more steps they took, up to 9,800 per day, similar to the earlier study. (It was also done by the same team and based on the same group of subjects.) They also noted that people who took 3,800 steps had about half the reduced risk of people who took 9,800, so perhaps that lower number would be a good target. if you are currently more sedentary. That said, this was also an observational study, and most of the participants were a bit young to start developing dementia.

For all-cause mortality in elderly women

This studio found a reduced risk of death from any cause in women who took 4,400 steps compared to those who took 2,700 steps per day. More was better, up to about 7,500 steps, after which the chance of dying seemed to level off. The step count numbers come from quartiles: the 25% of people with the lowest step counts averaged around 2,700.

A total of 16,741 women with a mean age of 72 years participated. They come from Women’s Health Study, which began as a 1990s trial of aspirin and vitamins for the prevention of heart disease and cancer. The participants are 95% white and the majority are nurses.

For mortality in middle-aged people

This studio compared steps per day with the risk of death in middle age (41 to 65). He found that people who took more than 7,000 steps had a 50% to 70% reduced mortality risk compared to people who took fewer than 7,000 steps a day. This number was chosen as the cutoff point because it is the number that The American College of Sports Medicine estimates such as a 30-minute walk each day plus a small amount of non-exercise activity.

The 2,110 participants were 57% women, 42% African American, and were followed for an average of about 11 years after the study.

For arterial stiffness

Hardening of the arteries is a component of cardiovascular disease. This systematic review found that increasing steps by 2,000 a day appears to reduce arterial stiffness by about the same amount as starting a structured exercise program. The categories compared in the analysis ranged from those who took fewer than 5,000 steps to those who took more than 10,000. The authors write: “In simple terms, these findings suggest that some physical activity is better than none, but also that more is better than less.”

The results come from 20 previous studies. Most were cross-sectional (comparing groups of people based on the number of steps they took), but some were randomized controlled trials or prospective studies.

For diabetes risk in Latino adults

This studio found that every 1,000 more steps per day was associated with a 2% lower risk of diabetes. People who took 10,000 to 12,000 steps per day had an 18% lower risk compared to those who took fewer than 5,000 steps per day.

Study participants included 6,634 Hispanic and Latino adults, half of them women, with a mean age of 39 years.

For all causes of mortality, but at different ages

This studio is interesting because it breaks down the results by age groups. Data from 15 studies suggest that mortality decreases with more steps to 6,000-8,000 steps for people aged 60 years and older, but that the equivalent in younger adults is 8,000-10,000.

What do we do with all this?

I think it would be a mistake to take these first-line results completely at face value. Can you reduce your risk of death by a certain percentage simply by deliberately walking a few thousand more steps per day? Almost all of these studies compared people who Already they walked different amounts, rather than tasking groups of people to increase the number of steps and see how their health changed.

But the results suggest that the healthiest people tend to have step counts that are at the higher 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 in a lower-risk category than those who take, say, 2,000. So if you’re currently fairly sedentary, it might be worth trying to increase your step count, even if there isn’t a specific study that says so. to have to meet such and such a number.

It is also interesting, I think, to see that there is no specific optimal number that these studies have identified, although we like to talk about these studies in detail. It’s not that you need to get to 10,000 because something different will happen than if you got 9,500.

The curves on the graphs in these papers tend to level off somewhere in the high four digits, but the estimates also become less certain there because there just aren’t many people getting more steps than this. A person who routinely takes 25,000 steps a day, for example, is off the charts. They may be super fit, or they may have an active job that makes them work harder than they can easily recover from; these studies are not designed to discover the difference.

The bottom line, then, is probably what you would have assumed even before checking the numbers: If you sit for a long time, moving more is probably good for you. And if you want specific guidance, you can go with the good old 150+ minutes of exercise per week guideline, or follow the various government project guidelines which recommend 8,500 steps per day (US Presidential Challenge), 7,000 to 10,000 (UK National Obesity Forum), or 8,000 to 10,000 (Japan).