Walking just 15,000 steps a week could add three years to your life claims study | Hacker News Reader

Walking just 15,000 steps a week could add three years to your life claims study

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Not too bad.

1000 steps takes about 10 minutes.

15K steps takes about 150 minutes.

150 min by 52 weeks in a year is 130 hours a year.

130 hours a year from say age 30 to age 80 is 6500 hours walking.

And so that gains you 3 years, which is 26280 hours, or 17520 awake hours.

So you are gaining about 17520-6500=11020 hours of life to use for things other than walking which is more like just under 2 years in days counting only awake hours.

Now of course it's certainly possible to do things you enjoy while you walk or perhaps things you would have done otherwise while not walking.

For instance I suppose a treadmill desk and using it to walk when you would have just been sitting instead.

I've been using my treadmill desk to walk 2-5 hours a day while studying system design to get into FAANG. It's been nice.

Do you mind sharing the treadmill that you are using? I know I can do a google search, but I read a lot of bad reviews on the cheap ones and that they smell like burnt plastic nearing 1hr continuous usage.

LifeSpan Fitness TR800 Portable Walking Under Desk Treadmill. This was 800 (7 years ago?). I've heard good things about new treadmills.

The worst thing about the one I have is that it's 96 lbs and heavy to move. When you move it out of the way to sit down it is a real task. What you want is something you can setup easily and use and just put it away. Heck. I'm considering to upgrade.

I am also considering to get a new one that goes up to 8 mph where this is locked at 4... Maybe there is safety concerns but we'll see. (8 mph?...maybe I should get a real treadmil already.)

Look at it this way: if you don't walk at least 15,000 steps a week, you can expect your lifespan to shorten by 3 years on average. 15,000 steps is in the realm of bare minimums.

As someone who has been getting around 15,000 steps per week (according to my phone), this number seems to low. I sometimes pace around while on the phone for work (usually without my phone on me, so my true number is likely a little higher). Other than that, I walk very little. Based on my experience living this life, it’s not good. I have had a noticeable decrease is how steady I am on my feet, various pains from a lack of movement and activity, and it got to the point where I received a notification on my phone that I’m at high risk of falling sometime in the next year. That’s not a notification someone in their early 40s should get.

Maybe 15k steps is better than laying in a bed all day and never waking at all; I’ll buy that. However, it’s far from optimal and shouldn’t be anyone’s benchmark, assuming they have some base level of mobility to start with.

Only getting 15,000 steps per week requires an extremely sedentary lifestyle, one which can likely only be accomplished while working from home.

Indeed, the only day in the last 4 weeks I walked so little was a day I worked for home and didn't venture more than a block from my condo, resulting in a mere 2,107 steps (according to my Garmin watch). On an average workday (where I commute to work via train + walking), it's hard to get below 6k steps..add taking the daughter to the playground or going to the store and my average over the last 4 weeks is 10,021 steps a day without particularly seeking out extra steps...

Exactly. There are all these steps you don't even think about when you actually have to leave the house.

I have estimated that I have to go on about a 90-100 minute walk a day to get back to what I was moving in 2019. I was walking 60 minutes a day , 5 times a week for exercise then and going to the office.

No humans have ever moved as little as the modern remote worker is moving. There is going to be a massive price to pay for this over time.

That is such a small number of steps.

It's small compared to the oft-repeated "10,000 steps per day" benchmark, but that originated as a marketing gimmick for pedometers with no scientific justification for the number. It's been a while since I've actually looked at studies, but I believe they mostly show diminishing returns that rapidly flatten at ~6,000-8,000 steps per day for most people. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if ~2,000 steps per day still has a significant benefit.

A study hit the news wires this week https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/06/every-step-a...

“Every step above 2,200 steps a day reduces risk of early death, study finds. Research suggests every extra step up to 10,000 reduces risk even if rest of the day is sedentary”

It is a small number of steps, but it is quite easy to not move much with a white collar job and everything delivered.

I bought a standing desk and a foldable walking pad. Over the course of a few weeks went from about 2000 steps a day to 12,000. Very happy with it and I feel much better.

That’s why I try to do 150,000 steps a week, I’ll live to be 120.

15,000 steps a day would be at least 11km each day for me and around thrice the amount of steps an average American walks each day on average [1]. Calling that a "small number of steps" just isn't true.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-dept...

This isn't each day, it's a week. 15,000 steps is roughly 6.5 miles (10.5km) and that's less than 1 mile (1.6km) a day or 2000 steps a day.

200+ steps every single waking hour seems like a lot. Especially considering that many people are expected to be glued to a desk for 8 or more hours nearly every day of the week. Schools and offices won't be happy with people getting up every hour to move even for a few minutes. Certainty not companies like Amazon where workers are so micromanaged that they have to piss in water bottles or wear diapers.

That is why you need to go for short walk every day. We're talking a 15 min walk.

Working in office gives lots of opportunities for extra steps. Park in the back of the lot. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Walk over to coworker's desk instead of online chat. Take the long way to the bathroom. The warehouse workers in Amazon probably get tens of thousands of steps doing their job.

I was getting plenty of steps when working in office, although that included walking to transit. Now that I work from home, I need to go for daily walk to get enough exercise, but I have errands and lunch to walk to.

In an office setting, 2k steps a day is literally nothing. You can get 2k steps by going on a leisurely stroll for 15 minutes. If you work in a large office building, you could be getting 2k steps just by walking to your desk and back from the parking lot, even if you take the elevator.

Unless you’re literally getting out of your bed and sitting at your desk and never leaving, I find it very hard to see how you can get less than 15k steps a week quite frankly. Even my most lethargic days where I stayed inside the entire day and at home I managed to clock 2.5k steps according to my watch. That’s just from walking around my house to get various things.

Coffee, bathroom trips, pacing around to think...the steps add up quickly. Or maybe our step counters are inflating the number.

Dude, I get in 0.6 miles a day just walking around my 1200 sq ft apartment. Believe me, it’s not a lot.

my bad, I misread, as people are usually talking about steps a day. sorry

In that case I agree with the comment above mine. 2,000 steps a day is already way below the average, so walking even less seems really unhealthy, not just due to less movement, but also the underlying causes for walking that little.

15,000 steps a day is decent, if nothing too special. But the post says per week - where are you getting per day from?

my bad, I misread, as people are usually talking about steps a day. sorry :/

It's per week, not per day, and it's not really a huge amount, but you're right, the typical suburbanite probably doesn't walk that much.

(15,000 steps/week) * (3 feet/step) / (5280 feet/mile) / (7 days/week) = 1.2 miles/day. Or, one 0.6-mile-distant round-trip

If you live in a city and take mass transit, you probably do more than this without thinking about it. If you're in the burbs, I don't know if random bumming around your house, and crossing a parking lot, and going from your desk to conference rooms a few times a day, would add up to that.

Bit more context - the Vitality here is a rewards program started by medical insurer Discovery.

One of those go to gym twice a week get a discount on something type of reward schemes. Also big on apple watches/step counters. And because its a program attached to medical insurance they have that data on medical side too.

So there is a whiff of PR & self-promotion in this, but they do also legitimately have access to good data at scale so probably not wrong

How much sampling bias is there in this, though? The people that own devices that can count steps will tend to be those who are active enough to consider monitoring them something that might be worth doing.

And then there are people like my wife that typically get over 5,000 "steps" because she's always doing things with her hands. Her insurance was giving her $60/year for wearing my old FitBit (I had upgraded to the waterproof version.) Now it's down to $20/year and soon she's going to quit wearing it. What they will really be measuring is that $20/year is not going to prompt her to replace it when the battery finishes dying.

not surprising, we didn't evolve living the sedentary life we are living today

Is there a difference between steps accumulated walking miles nonstop versus steps accumulated doing chores in the house in between longer bouts of sitting?

My gut assumption would be - yes?

Doesn’t almost everyone do lots more than that anyway?

I imagine so, I probably average more than 2000 steps around my apartment every day!

What a conveniently round number!

This problem, just like most modern ones, rely on civilians going out of their way and making the first step. The average Joe just prefers their current lifestyle

"Claims study" means nothing. Also what kind of life does it add? If a person sits on his ass all day, those are three worthless years.

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