Walking 9,000 to 10,000 steps a day appears to help prevent early death and heart-related events
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Taking 9,000 to 10,000 steps a day appears to reduce the risk of premature death or heart-related events, adding plausibility to an idea that has been criticized as unscientific.
The exact origins of the widespread belief that you should walk 10,000 steps a day are unclear, but it has been linked to a Japanese marketing campaign promoting pedometers.
Now, a study Matthew Ahmadi A professor at the University of Sydney in Australia and his colleagues say there may be some truth to this number.
The team analyzed more than 72,000 participants in the UK Biobank study, with an average age of 61, who wore motion-tracking accelerometers on their wrists for a week. “We were able to quantify the number of steps per day,” Ahmadi said.
Participants were then followed for an average of just under seven years, during which time 1,633 people died and 6,190 heart disease-related events occurred. After adjusting for other factors that may affect the risk of illness or death during that period, such as diet quality, smoking status and engaging in other forms of exercise, the researchers calculated that the optimal number of steps per day appeared to be between 9,000 and 10,000 steps, and then Earnings start to diminish.
Doing so reduced the risk of death during follow-up by 39% and the risk of heart disease-related events by 21%.
“This paper helps the field take a giant step forward in refining the science supporting guidelines for physical activity and sedentary time, pardon the pun,” said Dale Eslig at Loughborough University, UK. “This does seem to support the idea that the 10,000-step target, for which there was no evidence initially, may indeed be correct.”
However, although Nicholas Berger Eslig, of the University of Teesside in the UK, said the study was “very well designed” and used “rigorous methodology and statistical analysis”, but wrist-worn accelerometers are not always the best indicator of step count.
The researchers also didn’t take into account the number of steps taken per minute. “Approximately 6,000 steps at a higher cadence may be as protective of health as 10,000 steps at a slower cadence,” says Esliger.
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