How Many Steps Do You REALLY Need?
Hint: it depends
Welcome back to another edition of the free Friday newsletter here at the 5DLC, where every week we will do a deeper dive on a chosen aspect of health and fitness. To get full access to all my best work and to have a planned progressive workout program delivered to your inbox 3x per week, consider $5/month for a full subscription.
Steps. We love to talk about them in the fitness industry don’t we?
“Did you get your steps in today?”
“Ope, gotta go get my steps in.”
“Just out getting my steps in.”
Everything is about steps. Steps, steps STEPS.
You know that phenomenon where the more you say a word, the weirder it sounds? That’s what just happened to me with “steps.”
What even is that word?
Anyway, how many do you actually NEED in a day? Is it really 10k? OR, did a Japanese company create a pedometer called “Manpo-kei” which loosely means “10,000 step meter” because the Japanese character for 10,000 kind of resembles a person walking?
That’s a true story by the way. Genius level marketing.
That’s not to say that getting 10k steps in a day is bad, but it might not be the magic number it’s made out to be. In this piece, we’re going to examine the health benefits associated with steps, and how many you actually need.
Good morning my friends and happy Friday. Another weekend and Masters week is upon us. I hope you all had a productive week.
So, steps. How many of em do we actually need?
Would you say I’m copping out if I say it depends? Because it does.
It depends on how many you’re currently getting, and what your baseline fitness level currently is.
So I guess if you asked me how many steps per day you should do I would just go to those old Kobe System commercials… “more.”
IYKYK.
32 weeks of done for you strength training and nutrition guidance, all in 3 convenient ebooks that you only have to purchase once without an app or subscription? Yes please.
Grab the Busy Body Bundle here
But I do know some people that get like 15k per day, y’all are probably good.
I’m not going to just leave it at that though, THAT would be copping out.
Let’s look into some stuff and first see what getting our steps in actually does for us, yea?
Heart disease - A meta analysis of 18 studies comparing different levels of walking found that the highest walking group had a risk of heart disease roughly 30% lower than that of the lowest walking group. Another analysis found that adding in 30 minutes of normal walking per day 5 days a week was associated with a roughly 20% decrease in risk of heart disease.
Blood pressure - A study of about 6,000 Japanese men found that a walk of as little as 10 minutes long could potentially reduce your risk for high blood pressure by 12%, with the risk decreasing further as the walks got longer. Another study of more than 15,000 university graduates free from any disease found that a normal paced walk was enough to reduce your risk of high blood pressure.
Cognitive decline/dementia - Research on this matter has been inconsistent but there was one study that looked at the relationship between step counts and dementia risk and it found that roughly 9,800 steps per day could be associated with reduced dementia risk, with as little as 3,800 steps per day also reducing risk.
Diabetes - A pool of 5 studies found that regular walking of about 2.5 hours per week was associated with a 30% reduced risk of type II diabetes compared with almost no walking. This is consistent with the data that shows walking to be beneficial to manage blood sugar spikes after meals.
Sleep health - Several different studies have found an association between increased physical activity levels like walking, and longer, more restful sleep at night.
Mental health - While exercise cannot be a replacement for traditional mental health interventions, regular physical activity such as walking has been shown repeatedly to reduce the daily symptoms associated with anxiety and depression. Also, regular walking has been shown to increase participants creative output too.
Certainly, all of this can’t be done simply by walking more?
Certainly, it can though, and it is.
And I haven’t even mentioned the grand mac daddy of them all yet, which could answer the question of how many steps per day you actually need.
All-cause mortality rate, have you heard the term?
Basically, it just means the rate of dying from literally anything.
One very large study of over 17,000 participants found that 4,400 steps per day was associated with a 41% reduction in mortality rate compared to 2,700 steps per day. The mortality rates continued to decline up to about 7,500 steps per day, where the rates seemed to level off.
Basically, there’s your answer. About 7,500.
Let’s dig into that just a bit though.
So all of these benefits don’t necessarily come from getting one specific number of steps, but more so from the act of increasing from where you currently are. And the health benefits do level off when you get to a certain point(past about 7,500-8k).
So if you’re currently getting only 2k steps per day and you increase to 5k, your increase in health benefits will be tremendous. If you’re at 5k, and you increase to 7k, you’ll still get awesome increases in benefits, but not as substantial. If you’re already at 8k and you increase to 10k, your increased health benefits won’t be as much as going from 2 to 5, and if you’re already above 10k and you increase even more, you’ll already be getting basically all the benefits.
Don’t take that as me saying don’t do more than 8k, I’m just saying that the benefits do level off. So if you are getting 8-10k already and you feel like you need to force yourself to get more to get more benefits, you don’t.
You probably came here looking to get a concrete number and in true Justin fashion I used a bunch of nuance and bullshit. Crazy.
But, if you can get between 7 and 8k steps per day, you’ll be setting yourself up wonderfully for healthy living going forward.
The best part about all of this is that it can come from anything. Everything counts. Walking around the mall, grocery store or whatever. It all counts.
We just want to be less sedentary.
Move more, be healthier.
That is where I’ll leave you for today.
Have a great weekend.
-Justin