How Many Steps per Day?

When I call my Mom, she's often a bit distracted.  That's because she's "getting in her steps."  One way or another, she's going to get in her recommended 10,000 steps per day as reported by her Apple Watch or Fitbit ... not sure which. 

But who prescribed 10,000 steps per day, and is that a good number for every age and every goal?  Some people are interested in weight loss (or weight control), others want to optimize cardiovascular health, while others just want to live longer, healthier lives.  And the benefits may vary based on how old you are.

Some recent research provides more of a breakdown on all of this.  The research was published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, and it offered a threshold as low as about 4,000 steps per day if your only interest is cardiovascular health.  Of course, if you want other benefits, you will need to do more ... even up to that 10,000 steps per day.  (10,000 steps is about five miles for most people.)

So what did the researchers do?  They performed a "meta-analysis" of other research to synthesize findings suggested by the sum of the data.  They evaluated 17 studies involving 227,000 participants.  They evaluated changes in mortality based on increments of 500 steps per day, mortality due to cardiovascular issues and all-cause deaths.  They evaluated 1,884 deaths due to cardiovascular causes and 7,574 deaths due to all causes.  They went so far as to assess the effect of 20,000 steps per day.

A conclusion was that more steps is always better, but we don't all need to be at the 10,000 steps per day level.

CNN Health quoted Dr. Maciej Banach, deputy editor-in-chief of the European Society of Cardiology, "Adults 60 and older who walked between 6,000 and 10,000 steps a day saw a 42% reduction in risk of early death, while people under 60 who walked between 7,000 and 13,000 steps a day had a 49% reduction in risk."

There was another meta analysis in 2022 with similar results.  Here is a guide someone developed from this analysis. 

I have a FitBit.  Do I track my steps?  No, I use it to track my sleep.  For my regimen, I don't think step-counting would be worth the effort.  I'm on the treadmill six-days per week at 3.5 mph with an incline of 15 degrees for 55 minutes.  As we discussed in Beating the Dementia Monster, I am going for sustained aerobic exercise, and, according to this research, about 5.5 hours a week is optimal for people known to have Alzheimer's disease.  In fact, going more than six hours per week is actually associated with a decline in cognitive ability.  (This decline applies to people with Alzheimer's disease, not the healthy control group--people who do not have Alzheimer's disease.)  If you look at the article and scroll down to their graph, you find that study participants with the amount of exercise I'm getting have nearly the same cognitive health as the control group. 

But one way or another, just keep stepping.