Many of us track our steps with smartwatches, pedometers or phone apps and are of course thrilled when we reach that all-important daily goal of 10,000 steps. With the app I use, green confetti tumbles down the screen in congratulation. The app logs “strikes”, too, challenging me to see how often I can manage a week-long stretch above 10,000 steps a day. Answer: rarely.
It's clear that step counters are a crude tool for measuring purposes, and there are disagreements regarding their accuracy. Although sprinting doesn't improve your score any more than dawdling does, there is a noticeable difference in terms of fitness benefits. Nevertheless, they do offer a ballpark estimate of your level of activity.
The size of your goal matters if you are going to count steps. The default setting on the majority of tracking devices is 10,000 steps, the well-known target that everyone knows they should aim for. One might assume that years of research have been conducted to determine whether 8,000, 10,000, or even 12,000 may be the optimal number for long-term health.
The origin of the "10,000" magic number can be traced to a promotional campaign that was launched just prior to the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. A business started offering a pedometer called the Manpo-kei, where "man" stands for 10,000 steps, "po" for steps, and "kei" for meters. The number seems to have stuck, and it was a huge success.
Since then, research has compared the health advantages of 10,000 versus 5,000 steps, and it should come as no surprise that the higher number is preferable. However, none of the numbers in between had been examined until recently. They haven't been thoroughly tested on adults in general until now. The probability of dying from any cause, or "all-cause mortality," was compared with the daily step count of over 16,000 women in their seventies in a recent study led by Harvard Medical School professor I-Min Lee and her colleagues. Every woman wore a movement monitoring device for a week while she was awake. The researchers waited after that.
504 of the women were dead when they checked in with them, an average of four years and three months later. What is the estimated number of steps that the survivors have taken? Did the 10,000 steps a day magic work?
Since there were, on average, only 5,500 survivors, even small victories in small steps were significant. Compared to women who walked 2,700 steps a day, those who walked over 4,000 steps a day had a significantly higher chance of still being alive. It's astonishing that a seemingly insignificant variation could have an impact on something as important as longevity.
You might think that the more steps they took, the better, based on that logic. That was accurate for a range of steps, but only up to 7,500 steps per day, after which the benefits became insignificant. Beyond that, life expectancy remained unchanged.
Of course, one drawback of this study is that we can’t be certain that the steps preceded the illness that killed them. The researchers only included women who were fit enough to walk outside their home, and they did ask people to rate their own health, but perhaps there were some participants who were well enough to walk, but already not well enough to walk very far. In other words, they walked fewer steps because they were already unwell, and the steps themselves made no difference.
However, this study indicates that 7,500 may be sufficient for this age group; however, it's possible that taking additional precautions could offer more protection against particular conditions. The higher step count might also have indicated that the women had lived longer because they had generally been more active throughout their lives. This makes it challenging to pinpoint the precise health advantages of taking extra steps on their own.
Then there's the psychologically optimal step count question. The 10,000 target may seem like a lofty objective to meet on a daily basis, leading you to decide not to bother. It is demoralizing to constantly fall short of your objective on a daily basis.
By setting my app's default goal to 9,000 steps, I've conducted my own psychological experiment on myself. I fool myself into thinking that I walk the extra thousand yards around my house without my phone, but my true motivation is to boost my confidence by accomplishing more frequently.
A lower objective might be more psychologically beneficial in order to increase the sedentary person's step count.
Even so, there is always a chance that counting steps will take away from the inherent enjoyment of walking. Researchers led by US psychologist Jordan Etkin at Duke University discovered that while step-tracking participants did walk farther, they reported less enjoyment and that it felt like labor. Upon evaluation at the conclusion of the day, their contentment levels were inferior to those of individuals who had strolled without having their footsteps monitored.
The fittest may find that counting steps is counterproductive as well, suggesting that they should quit once they've reached the coveted 10,000 steps rather than increasing their activity level to become more fit.
From all of this, what conclusions can we draw? If counting inspires you, go ahead and do so, but keep in mind that 10,000 steps doesn't mean anything special. Decide what the ideal goal is for you. It could be throwing out your tracker completely, or it could be less or more.
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