Do you need to take 10,000 steps a day to be healthy? Science says no

Fitness monitoring devices like smartwatches generally recommend that we take 10,000 steps a day. But this goal, which many believe is rooted in science, is actually based on coincidence and the repetition of history rather than research.

According to Dr. I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert in step counting and health, the 10,000-step goal became popular in Japan in the 1960s.

A watchmaker, hoping to capitalize on interest in fitness after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, mass-produced a pedometer with a name that, written in Japanese characters, resembled a man walking. It also translates to “10,000-step meter,” creating a walking goal that, over the decades, has somehow become embedded in our global consciousness — and fitness trackers.

But today’s best science suggests that we don’t need to take 10,000 steps a day, which equates to about five miles, for the sake of our health or longevity.

A 2019 study by Dr. Lee and colleagues found that women in their 70s who were able to take just 4,400 steps a day reduced their risk of premature death by about 40%, compared with women who completed 2.7 steps. thousand or less.

The risks of early death continued to fall among women who walked more than 5,000 steps a day, but the benefits stabilized at around 7,500 steps a day. In other words, older women who completed less than half the mythical 10,000 steps a day tended to live substantially longer than those who covered even less terrain.

Another more comprehensive study last year of nearly 5,000 middle-aged men and women of various ethnicities also found that 10,000 steps a day is not a requirement for longevity.

In that study, people who walked about 8,000 steps a day were half as likely to die prematurely from heart disease or any other cause than those who walked 4,000 steps a day.

The statistical benefits of additional steps were small, meaning it didn’t hurt people taking more steps per day, up to and beyond the 10,000 mark. But the extra steps didn’t provide much additional protection against young death either.

Realistically, few people reach the goal of 10,000 steps. According to recent estimates, most adults in the United States, Canada and other Western countries average less than 5,000 steps a day. And if we reach the goal of 10,000, our achievement tends to be ephemeral.

A famous study carried out in Ghent, Belgium, in 2005, provided local citizens with pedometers and encouraged them to walk at least 10,000 steps a day for a year. Of the 660 men and women who completed the study, about 8% reached the daily goal by the end.

A follow-up study four years later showed that almost no one continued to walk much. Most had returned to their baseline, taking approximately the same number of steps as at the beginning of the study.

The good news is that increasing our current step count by a few thousand additional steps on most days can be a reasonable, sufficient, and achievable goal, said Dr. Lee.

Formal physical activity guidelines issued by the US and other governments use time, not steps, as a recommendation and suggest that we exercise for at least 150 minutes a week, or half an hour most days, in addition to whatever movement we can. do in our normal daily lives.

Translated into step counts, Lee said, that total would add up to just over 16,000 steps a week of exercise for most people, or about 2,000 to 3,000 steps most days. (Two thousand steps equals approximately 1 mile.)

If, like many people, we currently take around 5,000 steps a day during everyday activities like shopping and household chores, adding an extra 2,000 to 3,000 steps would bring us to a total of between 7,000 and 8,000 steps on most days, which, according to Dr. Lee, seems to be the sweet spot for step counting.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves