You’ve probably heard that taking 10,000 steps a day will help preserve your health. In fact, that’s the threshold you need to reach to receive a message from fitness monitors on smartphones, congratulating you on having covered the distance necessary to stay in shape.
But a new study of over 200,000 people reveals there are also health benefits from reaching a lower threshold.
This certainly doesn’t mean you should walk less: the risk of death is significantly reduced as the number of steps you take increases – starting from 4,000 steps, if all causes of death are taken into account.
Published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, this work involved 226,889 people from 17 different studies around the world, followed for an average of seven years.
At the end of their research, the scientists estimated that 2,337 daily steps were necessary to reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. This number rises to 3,967 daily steps to reduce the risk of death from all causes.
Nevertheless, this does not mean you should lower your walking targets. The study confirms that the more you walk, the greater the health benefits – up to (at least) 20,000 steps a day.
“The more you walk, the better,” study lead author Maciej Banach stressed. “We found that this applied to both men and women, irrespective of age, and irrespective of whether you live in a temperate, sub-tropical or sub-polar region of the world, or a region with a mix of climates.”
Combating sedentary lifestyles
This work shows that the risk of death drops significantly as soon as an individual takes 500 to 1,000 extra steps every day. In detail, an increase of 1,000 steps per day is associated with a 15% reduction in the risk of death from all causes, and an increase of 500 steps with a 7% reduction in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease.
The study authors were able to observe that health benefits continued to increase up to 20,000 steps per day, the maximum number of steps analysed for the purposes of this study.
They point out, however, that data remains limited for participants who took 20,000 steps a day, and that further research needs to be carried out with a larger group of people to confirm these results.
In any case, they believe that walking, whatever the number of steps, is essential, if only to combat a sedentary lifestyle, considered to be one of the main afflictions of modern society.
“In a world where we have more and more advanced drugs to target specific conditions such as cardiovascular disease, we should always emphasise that lifestyle changes – including diet and exercise, which was a main hero of our analysis – might be at least as, or even more, effective in reducing cardiovascular risk and prolonging lives,” Banach concluded.
According to the World Health Organization, a sedentary lifestyle is responsible for 3.2 to 5 million deaths worldwide every year. The global health authority points out that 70% of the world’s population does not meet the recommended level of physical activity of least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity endurance activity per week for an adult aged 18 to 64.