Even one extra walk a day may make a big difference, says expert

A new study of activity and mortality in older women finds that the total could be lower than many of us expect and that even small increases in steps can be meaningful. The study also side-eyes the validity, utility and origin of the common 10,000-step-a-day exercise goals built into so many of our phones and activity monitors and suggests, instead, that any moving, whether or not it counts as exercise, may help to extend people’s lives.

“People may not intuitively grasp what 150 minutes a week of exercise means in practical terms,” said I-Min Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, who led the new study.Step counts are a simpler, more concrete and convenient measure of physical activity, she said. We can understand the concept of a step and how to add them up. And, helpfully, many of us possess technology in our phones or activity monitors that will count our steps for us.

Many of us likely assume that the answer is 10,000, since so many of our activity monitors use that threshold as a goal. But no scientific evidence supports that idea, Prof Lee said. The concept of 10,000 steps seems to have originated, in fact, with a Japanese clockmaker in the 1960s, she said. It gave its consumer pedometer a Japanese name that translates as “10,000 steps” and somehow, that ideal took hold.

As part of that study, thousands of older women had worn a sophisticated activity monitor for a week. It tracked the steps each woman took per minute throughout the day .The women also provided information to the researchers about their overall health and lifestyles. Meanwhile, the sweet spot for reducing the risk of premature death was about 4,500 steps per day, the data showed. A woman who reached that threshold was about 40 per cent less likely to have died during the follow-up period than someone taking about 2,700 steps each day.

By now, almost all of us know that walking and other types of physical activity are indispensable to our well-being. Studies show that active people have lower incidences of heart disease, obesity and Type 2 diabetes and usually live longer than people who are sedentary.

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