Is Your Step Count Too Low? Try Walking Faster
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You don’t need to take 10,000 steps a day to improve your health. Studies have shown that much smaller step counts can substantially reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and death. Now, researchers have found that the intensity of your walk matters just as much, and that walking quickly—even for brief periods—lowers a person’s risk of death about as much as walking more slowly for a longer period of time.
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Their results, published September 8 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, suggest that for people looking to improve their health without walking more, walking faster is a good option.
What's the best step count and walking speed?
In this study, the researchers drew on data from participants in the UK Biobank, a long-term project that monitors the health of half a million people in the U.K. in hopes of uncovering the roots of disease. They aimed to fill a particular gap in the literature, says Borja del Poro 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.”
The team looked at participants’ step counts measured by wearable fitness trackers, how many steps they took per minute, and their likelihood of dying over the next few years. They uncovered a relationship: For people who walked fewer than 5,000 steps a day, keeping a quicker pace—about 100 steps a minute—meant a drop in their risk of death compared to people who walked the same number of steps more slowly.
At the same time, people who walked more slowly but for longer—5,000-7,500 steps a day—saw a similar drop in their risk.
This suggests that “someone who is below 5,000 steps per day, which is considered somewhat sedentary, might want to incorporate whatever they do in a more intense way,” del Poro Cruz says. “They can then maximize the benefits of what they do.”
It confirms, too, that racking up a high step count at a leisurely pace isn’t the same as doing the same thing briskly, in terms of health benefits.
The results are not surprising, says Dr. Shaan Kurshid, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in the study, but they clarify the relationship between steps and exercise intensity in a way that may be useful to physicians guiding people toward healthier habits. “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 can you tell if you’re walking fast enough?
It’s not always obvious. “If you say you're supposed to get 2.5 hours a week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity”—which is what U.S. federal guidelines recommend—“people then will naturally ask, ‘Well, what counts as moderate-to-vigorous activity?’” says Kurshid. It’s an “abstract concept.”
Here’s one way to estimate it: “If you go with someone and try to keep up a conversation, keeping up that conversation is not easy,” says del Poro Cruz. “Or, if you are by yourself and you are walking, if you try to sing a song, and you find that difficult, that means you are probably looking at 90-100 steps per minute, which is where we see the peak benefits.”