Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds
prevention.com
prevention.com
Doctors: Just 10,000 steps of walking every day is fine too!
Doctors: Ok, how about 8,000 steps only once or twice a week. Can you do that?
Doctors: For the love of god, please just get off the couch every once in a while...
I don't think many people need to worry about limb damage from over-walking, and the ones who have already experienced limb damage need to find alternative exercise rather than minmaxing steps...
There's even evidence that distance running strengthens your knees, contrary to common knowledge. https://archive.ph/utsUF
Worrying about too much exercise for the average person is like worrying about drinking too much water on a desert hike.
You really have to overdo it to get to negative consequences of light physical activities such as walking. Just talking a one hour walk every day surely doesn't get you anywhere near the red zone, provided you're otherwise reasonably healthy.
That said, we are discussing this in the context of walking a bit more, which should be very well-tolerated for pretty much everyone as long as they don’t have other significant health problems and work up gradually. For example, if you take 1000 steps a day, space out the increase by each week increasing your daily steps by 500-1000 steps a day until you reach 10000 steps a day over the course of a few months (temporarily pause or reverse the increases if you see anything other than passing muscular discomfort).
This also explains how ultramarathon (or other “extreme” physical activities) can be tolerated without much issue—bodies are very good at adapting to the loads that are placed on them as long as that increase is gradual and they have enough food and rest to rebuild after particularly intense bouts of activity.
A further corollary is that over the long term, being sedentary is not well-tolerated at all, so maintaining a certain baseline level of physical activity is definitely a better idea and as long as your body isn’t giving you any feedback to the contrary, you shouldn’t avoid high loads or intense activity just out of abstract fear of injury.
But as HN likes to day, the plural of anecdote is not data. Nor the dual: but for what it's worth, I haven't run a marathon since 1986, not have I stopped running.
It took the covid lockdowns for me to discover that I actually enjoy this stuff. I put some headphones on and listen some podcasts. I can't focus on a podcast at home or while working. I get distracted or I start doing other things and lose focus. When I walk, I listen. So when I want to listen to a podcast, I just go for a walk now. And if it's a long podcast, I just walk a bit longer.
Anyway, this stuff does seem to work for me. And I don't even mind doing it. Win win.
Meanwhile this is more like the 5th study I've heard of which talks about some measure of exercise at least 1-2 times a week, like 20+ minutes of cycling.
Although the studies I glanced at say something like:
<2000 steps, couch potato, certain doom
>2000 greatest reduction in risk
6,000–9,000 steps per day 50% reduced risk of CVD for 60+ year olds <=== you want to get used to this as your baseline to be a healthy silver fox
10k steps, marketing for original pedometer
20k steps, best way to lose weight, almost nobody does this daily :)
Here is a depressing video High School Fitness (1962): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGa6BPj3Mcw
And the easiest one to compare is of course US basic training standards that have gone down each time they have been revised since WWII.
I got it because I was hoping that having a neat gadget to track this stuff would help motivate me to get in those extra exercise minutes. It turns out that it works for me. Seeing the distance/step numbers go up satisfies the little "make graph go up" gremlin in my brain.
It's really motivating to see that number go up, or at least maintain it and build more area under the curve.
The Strava social component is also motivating because it adds some accountability with friends seeing and liking your workouts, and then noticing if you stop.
Mine went from mid 60s down to upper 40s within 6 months of getting my fitbit.
I started hiking regularly, and seeing that number drop consistently felt rewarding.
I did this when unemployed and hiked Arizona mountains almost daily, so this probably isn't typical, but it was part of a lifestyle shift towards fitness which has been wonderful.
That made me start running every day.
I am now on day 240 of my daily run streak (https://www.runeveryday.com/)
Sounds like fun but I don't know if I could stay motivated in the winter.
I wear pretty much the same clothes even if it is -10C. Just need a beanie and some thin gloves.
But it may help to start running during summer. Once you are past 3-4 weeks of running it is harder to stop than to continue.
Though I do get a few runs in on an indoor track.
There's a vocal group though, that will tell you how – finally – they're able to hit the gym four times a week.
It's less, but people think it's more. It might be true for some, some of the time for some months, but of course movement will decrease.
If you already are, what are the rates like for Starlink's jungle-rafting plan?
For the last 400 days, I walked at least 10 000 steps daily every day - in heat, frost, snow or rain. Sometimes much more, so the total sum exceeds 5 million steps.
My immune system has improved visibly, but all that activity didn't have any measurable effect on my weight, which has fluctuated randomly around the same set point as in the years before.
I wonder whether all the putative health effect stems from the immune system improvement.
It found a correlation between cardiovascular health and walking a certain amount a week. This does not at all suggest causation. I'm not nitpicking here. The most likely reason for this is that people who have a significantly more healthy life style have better cardiovascular health while also happening to move significantly more. Just getting up and walking 8k steps twice a week and otherwise having unhealthy lifestyle of the control group is possibly going to do nothing for your cardiovascular health. Claiming anything else needs much different evidence than the linked study.
Edit: I'm not saying walking is bad for you. That's just as wrong. I'm saying just walking won't do much for you. Get a more healthy lifestyle. Cardiovascular health will follow and you'll notice that 16k steps or something comparable will look small compared to what your active/healthy lifestyle will do.
You don't need to push hard all the time, in fact most of your exercise should be in aerobic mode, very little in anaerobic high bpm range. Getting 45 minutes of moderate movement 4-5x/week will improve your glucose management.
This is important because poor glucose management is a root cause of deterioration. Diabetics are the extreme example, but wild glucose swings are also causing deterioration in non-diabetics.
Comprehensive literature review has established that 2.5 hours a week at 3 MET reduces your risk of death by cardiovascular event by 70%, and there’s plenty of evidence for other benefits. The more you spread out the exercise the better.
Seriously, why would we expect the sedentary, monotonous life of office jobs or being couch potatoes to be good for us? This study only looks at duration of life, but quality of life is huge, too. Exposure to sunlight, using your body, socialization, and eating real food, all do wonders for our health, physical and mental.