Study finds walking 10,000 steps a day is the sweet spot for health, walking faster is even better

Walking 10,000 steps a day has become a popular fitness goal in recent years, but until now there hasn’t been much scientific research to back it up.

a lot of research Shows that physical exercise can improve health It offers anti-aging benefits, but few people have figured out exactly how many steps to take per day to optimize these benefits.

Scientists have now determined that a round count as high as 10,000 steps is certainly a good target for a range of health outcomes, but walking speed can be just as important.

Scientists from the University of Sydney and the University of Southern Denmark studied 78,500 adults in the UK between 2013 and 2015.

They wore activity trackers 24 hours a day to record their steps and pace. Researchers examined their health status seven years later.

Walking 10,000 steps a day was found to reduce the risk of dementia by about 50%, the risk of cancer by about 30%, and the risk of cardiovascular disease by about 75%.

The findings are “observation-based and cannot indicate direct cause and effect,” he said. However, they emphasized the “strong and consistent associations seen in both studies at the population level.”

Participants agreed to provide researchers with their health records, including inpatient registries, primary care records, and cancer and death registries.

Data were collected as part of the world’s largest step-tracking study of health outcomes.

Their work was published in a magazine earlier this month. JAMA Internal Medicine When Department of Neurology, JAMA.

Borja del Pozo Cruz, one of the study’s lead investigators, said: quirks and quarks Host Bob McDonald says the 10,000-step goal actually stems from a Japanese marketing campaign aimed at selling pedometers in the 1960s.

A pedometer made by a company called Yamasa many treasureswhich literally translates to “10,000 steps meters”.

At the time, there were no scientific studies to support that number, and little has been done since. This was largely due to the difficulty of collecting accurate data before the explosion of digital activity trackers.

Del Pozo Cruz, a senior researcher in health sciences at the University of Cadiz in Spain and adjunct professor at the University of Southern Denmark, said he and his team found that the 10,000-step mark seemed like a sweet spot for improvement. I said I was surprised. health outcomes.

But the study also found that you don’t need to walk the full 10,000 steps a day to see significant health benefits.

“The most important finding, at least for me, is that the first step was profitable,” Del Pozo Cruz said.

They found that every 2,000 steps taken reduced the risk of premature death by 8-11%, up to about 10,000 steps per day. The study found that health plateaued after 10,000 steps.

“For some people, this [10,000] The numbers may be unrealistic,” Del Pozo Cruz said. Nothing is better than nothing, so just get out there and do it. “

Research so far Advertise the benefits of walking, including one in 2019 It was found that walking as little as 2,000 steps a day could reduce mortality.

But while these studies focus on mortality, Del Pozo-Cruz said, his team’s research looks at links between walking and health conditions such as cancer, dementia and cardiovascular disease. This is the first study of its kind.

faster is better

The study also found that walking at a faster pace was associated with additional benefits for all outcomes they measured.

For example, Del Pozo Cruz says that walking 10,000 steps a day reduces the risk of dementia by 50%, but walking at a faster pace can reduce the risk by another 10-15%.

“How fast you walk is just as important, if not more important, than how far you walk,” he said. “For even more optimal health, he recommends doing 10,000 steps, maybe 30 minutes, at a faster pace.”

Del Pozo Cruz says that very high steps (in the 20,000+ step range) can actually reduce health benefits.

Because the current dataset consists of predominantly Caucasian, healthy, well-educated individuals aged 40 to 79, his team hopes to quickly replicate the study in a more diverse population. He added that there are.

Produced and written by Maya Lach-Aidelbaum.