While people frequently cite 10,000 steps a day as being the healthy benchmark, study after study has found that’s not a magic number.
A new study found that older women can reduce their risk of an early death by walking 4,000 steps in a day, one or two days a week. Compared to women who didn’t walk, the women who walked 4,000 steps in a day, one or two days a week, had a 26 percent lower risk of death from any cause and a 27 percent lower heart disease risk. If they walked 4,000 steps three days a week, they had a 40 percent reduced earlier death risk and a 27 percent lower risk of heart disease. More steps continued to lower the death risk, but the benefits were less impressive.
The study used 13,547 women who were around 72 years old. None of them had cancer or heart disease at the beginning of the trial. They wore pedometers for seven consecutive days to measure their steps and were tracked for 11 years. During the study, 1,765 participants died and 781 developed heart disease.
Researchers from Harvard said, “The number of steps per day, rather than the frequency of days per week achieving a particular step threshold is important… Physical activity guidelines in older women should consider recommending at least 4,000 steps per day on one to two days per week to lower mortality and cardiovascular disease risk.”
“I think this is important, because the 4,000 steps per day for two, three days per week is very attainable, even for older adults,” said lead study author Dr. Rikuta Hamaya of Brigham Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The researchers added that if walking isn’t a person’s preferred form of movement, dancing, gardening or activities like playing pickleball are all wonderful ways of getting exercise and physical activity into the day. And people with mobility issues can do chair exercises with or without weights or hand cycling to stay active.
The 10,000 steps myth was taken from an ad for a Japanese pedometer decades ago. “It has not been backed up by scientific evidence,” said Amanda Paluch, a professor of kinesiology at the Univ. of Massachusetts.
Studies that show what physical exercise does for the body, rather than old aphorisms from baseless ads, help us learn more about ourselves. 10,000 steps is a lot to fit into your day. But 4,000 a few times a week is much more manageable.
