You do not need 10,000 steps a day to improve your health. Earlier studies have shown that much smaller step counts can substantially reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and death. Now researchers say intensity matters just as much. Walking quickly, even for brief periods, is linked to a similar drop in the risk of death as walking more slowly for a longer time.
The results, published September 8 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, suggest that people who want to improve their health without walking more may do well to walk faster.
The team used the UK Biobank, a long-term project that follows about half a million people in the United Kingdom. For this paper they focused on 64,743 middle-aged participants who wore a fitness tracker for seven days between 2013 and 2015. Researchers then watched who died over about eight years.
They wanted to fill a gap, says Borja del Pozo Cruz, a professor at Universidad Europea de Madrid and an author of the study. "The vast majority of the body of evidence had looked at the volume of daily steps and health outcomes," he says. "Few studies have isolated and looked at cadence," meaning steps per minute.
The team compared daily step counts, cadence, and later death. Among people who walked fewer than 5,000 steps a day, a quicker pace, about 100 steps a minute, was linked to a lower risk of death than the same number of steps taken slowly. People who walked more slowly but longer, 5,000 to 7,500 steps a day, saw a similar drop.
That means someone below 5,000 steps, a range often called somewhat sedentary, "might want to incorporate whatever they do in a more intense way," del Pozo Cruz says. "They can then maximize the benefits of what they do." Racking up a high step count at a leisurely pace is not the same, for health, as covering those steps briskly.
The popular 10,000-step target did not come from this kind of evidence. A co-author on the paper, Nicholas Koemel, has noted that it grew out of a 1960s Japanese pedometer campaign. The new findings do not tell everyone to chase that number.
The results are not surprising, says Dr. Shaan Khurshid, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in the study. A cardiac electrophysiologist is a heart doctor who studies the heart's electrical rhythm. He says the findings may help physicians talk about steps in a way patients already understand. "The steps concept is important because it can resonate with people," he says, "and so I think that improving our understanding of that metric and how to best use it is important."
How fast is fast enough? U.S. guidelines recommend 2.5 hours a week of moderate-to-vigorous activity, and people then ask what that feels like. Del Pozo Cruz offers a simple test. If you walk with someone and holding a conversation is not easy, you are probably in the right zone. If you are alone and find it difficult to sing, you are probably near 90 to 100 steps per minute, "which is where we see the peak benefits."
Researchers on the paper also note that no single pace suits everyone. A speed that feels easy at forty may be hard at seventy. The point is not a perfect number on a watch. It is a walk that makes you breathe a little harder, most days, without needing 10,000 steps to start.