Forget 10k Steps. Here's How Much Science Says You Need to Walk

I feel like these articles happen every year and they all try to give you some type of new recommendation while saying the research reality very quietly.

These studies constantly show that you should try to walk as much as you can throughout your busy day. The mortality decrease alone with every 500-1000 steps is quite the motivation.

It's hard to spend an hour and a half or longer to get to that original 10000 steps mark. We should however encourage movement. A little movement leads to more movement as you start to feel better.

What should not happen is to lower the bar of how many steps you "need" each day. Because that is what articles like this and popular health magazines will try to portray.

Original research article: The association between daily step count and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality: a meta-analysis - https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...

Possibly the most telling graph is Figure 3 (not link-able): a continuous curve degrading the "all-cause mortality" risk, steeper-before-flatter-after the (very roughly) 7000 steps, but with continuous gain (up to the scale end of 20000).

“Adults older than 60 saw about a 42% drop in mortality risk when they walked between 6,000 and 10,000 steps per day, while those younger than 60 saw a roughly 49% reduction when they walked between 7,000 and 13,000 steps per day.”

I don't know how 10k became the rallying number for walking. Overall steps help, yes. But what's important is the amount of walking you do outside your own daily activity. I.e., if you walk for work- this doesn't really count (unless you're a mail delivery person, perhaps).

Time spent is probably more important than actual number of steps, in my opinion. A one-hour+ walk (in addition to your normal activity, divided up across the day), regardless of how fast you go, is more valuable than a walk that nets you 5,000+ steps. Not everyone can walk 5,000+ steps in a day, and not everyone should try to reach that.