Walking 7,000 steps a day reduces your risk of premature death by 70% within the next 10 years

If you’re in need of an exercise goal, check out this new figure: 7,000 steps a day, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Network Open, will help you stay healthy and lose weight. 50-70% risk of premature death within the next 10 years.

The previous figure, 10,000 steps per day, was often an overwhelming goal for many people, the authors say. At an average walking pace, we can take 100 steps per minute, which means that it takes 1 hour and 40 minutes of walking a day to reach the goal of 10,000 steps.

In these days of social distancing, people can only walk around their homes or small living spaces, that goal becomes even more impossible because most of us do not have a treadmill available in our homes. home.

So go for a lower number and you can still get huge benefits from it. ” Instead of focusing on 10,000 steps a day, focus on how many more steps you took than the day before, ” says Dr. Michael Massoomi, an associate professor of clinical cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Florida said.

What does that mean? If you’ve only walked 4,000 steps today, try to increase that to 5,000 tomorrow, it’s just adding 10 minutes of walking to your schedule. If you do this every day, in just 3 days, you will reach your goal of 7,000 steps.

Benefits of counting steps

As a professor of cardiology, Dr. Massoomi understands the importance of walking exercise. Just get up from the chair and take the first step, your body has started to burn 3 times more calories than at rest.

Walking helps regulate breathing, improves cardiovascular health, bones and joints, prevents the risk of overweight, obesity, diabetes and even cancer. A few minutes of walking can also immediately help you improve your mood, get rid of the feeling of drowsiness, fatigue or numbness after stressful working hours.

But what makes walking the most popular exercise, is its convenience. You can start walking wherever, whenever you want. It can be integrated in all daily activities. Working from home, and you’re thirsty? Get up, go get a glass of water and you’ve added 50-100 cumulative steps to your daily goal.

The number will be immediately recorded by all bracelets, smartwatches or even mobile phones these days that have built-in pedometer sensors, allowing you to set a step count goal. mine. At the end of the day, these devices will let you know if you’ve reached your goal.

Although when it comes to training, there’s no magic number that works for everyone. However, that doesn’t mean the numbers don’t matter. After all, steps are an easy-to-remember, easy-to-measure, and very convenient metric.

Dr. Massoomi said he still counts his steps every day. ” You don’t need anything fancy or expensive to count your steps ,” he says. ” There are tons of free apps right on your phone that can help, and they work great.”

Sharing this with Dr. Massoomi is Robin Diamond, a journalist living in Miami. She says she is ” obsessed with every step ” she takes every day. Diamond wears an Apple Watch, and as many people know before, she sets a goal of walking 10,000 steps a day on the watch as a health goal.

During Miami’s COVID-19 lockdown, Diamond ordered a treadmill to make sure she reached her daily walking goal. ” Walking helps me stay awake and heals my body ,” she says.

Set a goal of 7,000 steps a day

Diamond is like many people today who think 10,000 steps is a perfect target number for walking. Of course, there is scientific evidence for that number. Some studies have found that people who walk 10,000 steps a day can cut their risk of premature death from all causes, thanks to the benefits of walking.

But that doesn’t mean a lower goal is useless, and you must hit 10,000 steps in 24 hours to enjoy those benefits.

To figure out the formula ” X steps a day will give you a healthy body ” and how much X can be reduced, a team of scientists led by Amanda Paluch, an epidemiologist from the University of Massachusetts, followed a cohort of more than 2,000 people for 10.8 years, starting in 2005.

These people had an average age of 45 and wore accelerometers that counted the number of steps they took each day, the intensity of each step, and the speed at which they walked.

The results showed that people who took more than 7,000 steps a day had about 50 to 70 percent lower risk of premature death than those who took fewer steps. Step intensity (a measure of how quickly a movement is made) by itself did not affect mortality.

Meanwhile, the group of people who walked more than 10,000 steps per day did not have a significant reduction in mortality compared with the group who walked more than 7,000 steps.

On that basis, the researchers argue that sedentary people may benefit from a specific number of steps in the day they take, but after a certain milestone, taking more steps furthermore did not seem to provide a more pronounced benefit, at least not with this mortality study.

” Steps per day is a simple, easy-to-track metric, and taking more steps per day can be a good way to promote health,” says Paluch. However, her research in JAMA shows that ” walking more than 10,000 steps per day is not associated with a reduced risk of death”.

So, Paluch says, people who haven’t hit 10,000 steps a day need not blame themselves, they can reduce their goal to 7,000 steps a day and still reap great benefits from walking.

Refer to Sciencealert