Another, more extensive study from last year with almost 5,000 middle-aged men and women of different ethnicities also found that 10,000 steps per day is not a prerequisite for a long life. In this study, people who walked about 8,000 steps a day were half as likely to die from heart disease or other cause as those who walked 4,000 steps a day. The statistical benefit of additional steps was small, which means it didn’t hurt people to collect more steps up to the 10,000 step mark and beyond every day. But even the additional steps did not offer any additional protection against dying in youth.
Realistically, few of us reach that 10,000-step goal anyway. Recent estimates suggest that most adults in America, Canada, and other western countries walk an average of less than 5,000 steps a day.
And when we hit the 10,000-step goal, our performance tends to be short-lived. A famous study in Ghent, Belgium, made pedometers available to local residents in 2005 and encouraged them to take at least 10,000 steps a day for a year. Of the 660 men and women who completed the study, about 8 percent ended up meeting the daily goal of 10,000 steps. But in a follow-up study four years later, hardly anyone went that far. Most had returned to their baseline and were now taking about the same number of steps as at the start of the study.
The good news is that increasing our current step count by as much as a few thousand extra steps on most days might be a reasonable, sufficient – and achievable – goal, said Dr. Lee. The formal physical activity guidelines issued by the United States and other governments use time, not steps, as a recommendation and suggest that we exercise at least 150 minutes a week, or half an hour most days, in addition to any exercise as part of our normal, daily life. Translated into step numbers, said Dr. Lee, that total would add up to a little over 16,000 steps a week for most people, or about 2,000 to 3,000 steps most days. (Two thousand steps is about a mile.) If we currently, like many people, take about 5,000 steps a day in everyday activities such as shopping and doing housework, with the additional 2,000 to 3,000 steps we would total between 7,000 and 8,000 steps most days, what according to Dr. Lee seems to be the sweet spot for step count.
