Walking 10km a day is a health sweet spot, study finds – and walking faster is even better CBC radio

In recent years, walking 10,000 steps a day has become a popular fitness goal, but until now there hasn’t been much scientific research to back that number.

A number of studies have shown that physical activity can improve health and provide anti-aging benefits, but few have looked closely at how many steps people should be walking per day to maximize those benefits.

Now scientists have found that the big round number of 10,000 steps is indeed a great target for a range of health outcomes, but how fast you walk might be just as important.

Researchers from the University of Sydney and the University of Southern Denmark studied 78,500 UK adults between 2013 and 2015.

They wore activity trackers 24/7 for a week that recorded how many steps they walked and how fast they walked. Seven years later, the researchers looked at their health outcomes.

They found that walking 10,000 steps a day reduced the risk of dementia by about 50 percent, the risk of cancer by about 30 percent, and the risk of cardiovascular disease by about 75 percent.

The study notes that the results “are observational, meaning they cannot show direct cause and effect.” However, it emphasized the “strong and consistent associations found at the population level in both studies.”

Participants agreed to provide the researchers with their medical records, including inpatient hospital registers, primary care registers, and cancer and death registers.

The data was collected as part of the world’s largest study tracking step counts for health outcomes.

Their work was published earlier this month in the journals JAMA Internal Medicine and JAMA Neurology.

Borja del Pozo Cruz, one of the lead researchers on the study, said Quirks & Quarks Host Bob McDonald states that the 10,000-step goal actually came from a 1960s Japanese marketing campaign aimed at selling pedometers.

The pedometer manufactured by the Yamasa company was called The manpo-keiwhich literally translates to “10,000 paces”.

At the time, there was no scientific research to back this number, and little had been done since then, largely because it was difficult to collect accurate data before digital activity trackers exploded in popularity.

Del Pozo Cruz, who is also a senior researcher in health sciences at the University of Cadiz in Spain and an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, said he and his team were surprised that the 10,000-step mark was the sweet spot for better things to happen seemed health consequences.

However, the study also found that you don’t have to walk the full 10,000 steps per day to see significant health benefits.

“I think, for me at least, the most important realization was that the benefits are there at the very first step,” del Pozo Cruz said.

The results showed that every 2,000 steps gradually reduced the risk of premature death by eight to eleven percent, up to about 10,000 steps per day. The study found that health outcomes plateaued after 10,000 steps.

“For some people it is [10,000] Number might be unrealistic,” del Pozo Cruz said. “It is important that every step counts. Just go out there and do it because anything is better than nothing.”

Previous studies have touted the benefits of walking, including one from 2019 that found that walking as little as 2,000 steps a day could reduce mortality rates.

But del Pozo Cruz says that while those studies have focused on mortality rates, his team’s study is the first to examine the link between walking and health outcomes such as cancer, dementia and cardiovascular disease.

Faster is better

The study also found that walking faster was associated with other benefits across all measured outcomes.

For example, Del Pozo Cruz said that walking 10,000 steps a day reduces the risk of dementia by 50 percent — but walking faster can reduce the risk by an additional 10 to 15 percent.

“How fast you walk is just as important, if not more so, than how much you walk,” he said. “For even more optimal health, you would take 10,000 steps and maybe 30 minutes of them at a faster pace.”

Del Pozo Cruz said very high step counts — in the 20,000-step range and beyond — could actually reduce health benefits.

He added that his team hopes to replicate the study in more diverse populations soon, since the current data set consisted mostly of white, healthy, well-educated people between the ages of 40 and 79.

Produced and written by Maya Lach-Aidelbaum.