This is a great topic of debate – how many steps per day and how often per week is enough? We all hear that 10,000 steps is the magic number, but Michael Mosley (aww we miss him so much) shared that this came from a 1960’s marketing campaign for a pedometer.
Exciting new research has taken a really comprehensive look at all of the human studies that have been done to look at the health benefits of the number of daily steps. This type of research is called a systematic review and it pools together all clinical trials on a topic and analyses them. The work was led by a fabulously-named Professor Ding Ding, and the authors found 57 clinical studies in all and looked at the results to see whether number of steps was related to different medical outcomes. These include “all cause mortality” which is a trial measurement that totals up as it says mortality from any cause. It then broke this down by mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer, depression, type 2 diabetes, falls and other outcomes.
What did they find?
They did the maths to compare different numbers of steps in the data. The found 7000 steps per day to be beneficial with a 47% lower risk of all-cause mortality, a 47% lower risk of cardiovascular disease mortality, and lower risk of cancer mortality, type 2 diabetes, dementia, risk of falls and depressive symptoms. They do suggest that more research is needed in some areas, to strengthen the data.
What to take away
The results are quite compelling – achieving around 7000 steps per day is beneficial for our health and protects against potential future illness. Of course what we don’t know is whether the people within these studies were on similar diets and had similar lifestyles, but it would be unlikely as the studies were from all over the world and across different age groups.
But as a health goal, trying to achieve 7000 steps a day, or as much as can be achieved over a week, is a good thing. This feels more achievable than 10,000 as this for me anyway is an hours walk a day which I’d struggle to fit in most days.
How to boost the benefits of walking even more
You can buy hand weights to help give your arms a bit more of a work out. You could do some of your steps briskly to raise your pulse rate. Factoring in a hill is excellent for the heart. Walking any of your steps in nature will provide you with further benefits. We probably want to avoid just walking around streets where there is busy traffic if we can.
Happy walking!