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Sweet Spot For Daily Steps Is Lower Than Often Thought, New Study Finds (theconversation.com) 75

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
A massive review of over 160,000 people's step counts has revealed that meaningful health benefits begin far below the popular 10,000-step myth. The new study found that health benefits start at as low as 2,500 daily steps, with the biggest gains capping around 7,000. "People hitting 7,000 daily steps had a 47% lower risk of dying prematurely than those managing just 2,000 steps, plus extra protection against heart disease, cancer and dementia," reports The Conversation. From the report: The findings come from the biggest review of step counts and health ever done. Researchers gathered data from 57 separate studies tracking more than 160,000 people for up to two decades, then combined all the results to spot patterns that individual studies might miss. This approach, called a systematic review, gives scientists much more confidence in their conclusions than any single study could.

So where did that magic 10,000 number come from? A pedometer company called Yamasa wanted to cash in on 1964 Tokyo Olympics fever. It launched a device called Manpo-kei -- literally "10,000 steps meter." The Japanese character for 10,000 resembles a walking person, while 10,000 itself is a memorable round number. It was a clever marketing choice that stuck. At that time, there was no robust evidence for whether a target of 10,000 steps made sense. Early research suggested that jumping from a typical 3,000 to 5,000 daily steps to 10,000 would burn roughly 300 to 400 extra calories a day. So the target wasn't completely random -- just accidentally reasonable.

This latest research paper looked across a broad spectrum -- not just whether people died, but heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, depression and even falls. The results tell a fascinating story. Even tiny increases matter. Jump from 2,000 to 4,000 steps daily and your death risk drops by 36%. That's a substantial improvement. But here's where it gets interesting. The biggest health benefits happen between zero and 7,000 steps. Beyond that, benefits keep coming, but they level off considerably. Studies have found meaningful benefits starting at just 2,517 steps per day. For some people, that could be as little as a 20-minute stroll around the block. Age changes everything, too. If you're over 60, you hit maximum benefits at 6,000 to 8,000 daily steps. Under 60? You need 8,000 to 10,000 steps for the same protection. Your 70-year-old neighbor gets 77% lower heart disease risk at just 4,500 steps daily.

The real secret of why fitness targets often fail? People give up on them. Research comparing different step goals found a clear pattern. Eighty-five per cent of people stuck with 10,000 daily steps. Bump it to 12,500 steps and only 77% kept going. Push for 15,000 steps and you lose nearly a third of people.

Sweet Spot For Daily Steps Is Lower Than Often Thought, New Study Finds More | Reply

Sweet Spot For Daily Steps Is Lower Than Often Thought, New Study Finds

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  • Nonsense. (Score:4, Informative)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Thursday July 24, 2025 @03:20AM (#65541550) Homepage

    2500 steps is literally "existing as a human" unless you're bed-bound.

    Someone once gave me their pedometer in a bid to prove that they were more active than I was (I have an office job).

    In the course of a working day, just doing what I always do, I blew through 10,000 steps by lunchtime. They didn't believe me. They were somehow going OUT OF THEIR WAY to struggle to complete 10,000 steps including going for a long walk for lunch.

    But 2500 steps? Yeah, you can do that just getting up and getting to work and then coming home, let alone anything you do in-between.

    • Re: Nonsense. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Fons_de_spons ( 1311177 ) on Thursday July 24, 2025 @03:42AM (#65541570)
      I teach in a big building, going from classroom to classroom. That gets me around 6000 steps. I used to do an office job, took the stairs to get some exercise. Half of that. Looks like your office job includes more than average walking?

    • What were you doing, visiting every desk in the building? Or did you walk 3 miles to work as well?

      • What were you doing, visiting every desk in the building? Or did you walk 3 miles to work as well?

        I don't know about him, but my present work is spread over a wide area, all walking access. I can easily do 5 miles in a day at it.

    • I average 500 steps a day and there's little excuse for this other than I don't need to go anywhere. Toilet, kitchen, living room, bedroom.
      The idea of walking 3 miles around one of the most deprived areas in my country appeals less and less every day.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Malc ( 1751 )

        Working from home is slowly killing you! As is owning a car. According to my phone, I've averaged about 10,000 steps per day over the last six months. Last time I worked from home, I barely made 600. I sold my car in 2008 and go to the office every day (lucky to have a short commute at the moment), which I'm sure are both beneficial to my health.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          No, being lazy is.

          A 5 km walk for most people is going to be 6-7 thousand steps and should take about an hour, which is about the average American daily commute.

    • In the course of a working day, just doing what I always do, I blew through 10,000 steps by lunchtime.

      Sorry but you are not the norm. Your office layout is not the norm, or maybe your commute is not the norm. If I just go to the office and work the day there I would struggle to exceed 5000 steps. If I work from home without doing any additional activity for they day I can be under 3000 steps easy. If I have a particularly lazy day under 1000.

      I actually have to put effort in to get to 10000 steps (by effort I mean more than work and stay at home, such as go to the shops, walk a dog, go out with friends, or d

      • In the course of a working day, just doing what I always do, I blew through 10,000 steps by lunchtime.

        Sorry but you are not the norm. Your office layout is not the norm, or maybe your commute is not the norm. If I just go to the office and work the day there I would struggle to exceed 5000 steps. If I work from home without doing any additional activity for the day I can be under 3000 steps easy. If I have a particularly lazy day under 1000.

        I actually have to put effort in to get to 10000 steps (by effort I mean more than work and stay at home, such as go to the shops, walk a dog, go out with friends, or do any basic activity).

        As I've noted, I easily do 5 miles a day at work. Even with my injury laden knees and ankle. "Norm" is a tough one to quantify.

        The reality is a great many people don't put effort in. Heck my American colleagues even joked about the ways they game their fitbit (for insurance purposes) in order to get over the 10k steps threshold. One puts her fitbit on the dog so it counts as about 3x as many steps to take the dog out. The other throws it in the drier when she does her cloths since that easily adds a couple of thousand.

        Your American colleagues are deceitful idiots then. Walking has so many benefits, far beyond just physical. When I walk outside of my work environment, it makes for a wonderful change of pace. You get to observe the beauty around you, you can put your thinking hat on automatic, and let it process things in the background while you enjoy that change of pace. any successful people I k

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Malc ( 1751 )

        One puts her fitbit on the dog

        When we had Vitality healthcare at work, they explicitly said that they had ways to detect this very trick. Not so good when at detecting that it's your child with your running around with your phone though ;). Never mind that some of these health companies are also involved in pensions and, as a healthy and active person, I don't think I want them making decisions about what annuity I might possibly get later in life. The less data you share with these companies, the better.

    • I do 30 minutes on the treadmill every morning and do the same amount of time during my lunch walk. Between those and my regular moving around in the office, I just barely crack 10k.

      So, I am guessing that you either do a lot of hand gesticulation or have a much more active job than you think. (Or that pedometer was junk. Fitbits are notoriously sensitive and will inflate step counts by as much as 2k in any given day. At least that was my experience back when I had one)

    • Office layout can make a difference, I get a lot more steps since moving to the bigger office campus we have. At the smaller one, there was one coworker who was a little overweight that eventually got resorted to a desk at the front of the building rather than the back and it had a noted affect on their weight since that was about all the exercise they did for the day. Since then I started taking the stairs more often...

    • Do you trust your monitor?
      Some time ago I changed from an Asus smartwatch to a Samsung and my daily stem count dropped 70 per cent, per the smartwatch.
      In my work group we compared the step count going to and from the coffee shop.
      The person with the FitBit regularly showed double my step count Apple watch usually showed triple.
      Scientific Conclusion: Apple makes healthier, right?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Step counting is pretty unreliable in general. I've worked with research step counters, expensive things dedicated to the purpose, and you still get people (recovering from surgery) that apparently walk 50k steps per day. Distance covered is better, but GPS is the best way to measure it and it doesn't work so well inside. Moving time is pretty good though, and can be measured fairly reliably.

        But step counting is easier to gamify.

    • More likely your pedometer is counting double or triple. Did you spend 2 hours walking between classrooms over a day? If not, then you can't be clocking 10000 steps.

    • 2500 steps is literally "existing as a human" unless you're bed-bound.

      Yeah, I went back and looked - even on those work-from-home days when I'm more sedentary than I should be... I'm still typically hitting 3000-4000 steps. A trip to the grocery store or mowing the lawn bumps me up over 5000.

      And to be clear - I don't think what I'm doing right now is adequate, I do believe I should be more active than I currently am.

  • Just be a (hobby) programmer (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JamesTRexx ( 675890 ) on Thursday July 24, 2025 @03:35AM (#65541562) Journal

    While I'm refactoring my personal fork of OpenTTD, I simply walk circles in my livingroom while carrying low weights during large compiles which take around 6 minutes, or run a profile test game which takes 8 to 9 minutes.
    Doing this around 10 times a day has so far lowered my weight by 1 kilo a week on average in combination with most days making sure I don't eat more than 2000 kcal. And I still went for a good bite and a beer with my best mate on saturdays.

  • my ride on lawnmower gives me plenty of free steps - must be the vibration. Easy exercise!

  • Perspective-rounding. (Score:5, Informative)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday July 24, 2025 @03:56AM (#65541590)

    Why the nice round number of 10,000?

    Well, from the Japanese perspective..10,000 steps might be considered a warm-up. An easy daily goal.

    Also, from the Japanese perspective..most of you look like you could use at least 10,000 steps. (Needless to say this exercise trend didn’t really catch on too well in the West, since obesity rates have tripled since the 60s.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      You are way overthinking it. Japanese numbers use powers of ten up to 10,000 and then switch to powers of 10,000. 1,000,000 is called "100 man" (a hundred 10,000-unit counts) and the next largest value with its own name is 100,000,000 (one "oku"). That's why they settled on 10,000 as the nice round number.

    • Why the nice round number of 10,000?

      Well, from the Japanese perspective..10,000 steps might be considered a warm-up. An easy daily goal.

      Also, from the Japanese perspective..most of you look like you could use at least 10,000 steps. (Needless to say this exercise trend didn’t really catch on too well in the West, since obesity rates have tripled since the 60s.)

      As an old Jock, it is a struggle. For so many years, I played 3 Ice Hockey games a week on average. I could eat whatever I wanted to eat and have trouble keeping weight on. The cruelty is that after I retired from it in my mid 50's the intense exercise went away, but not the appetite. It took a few years to get that under control.

      Going to one meal a day, and chewing on a lot of Ice cubes helped a lot. But I still have to keep close control over the hunger pangs which haven't figured it out yet.

    • Why the nice round number of 10,000?

      From what I've read elsewhere it came from the adverts for the original pedometer.

      The figure of 10,000 steps can be traced back to a 1960s marketing campaign in Japan. In the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a brand of pedometer was launched called the manpo-kei, which translates as "10,000-step meter".

  • So, why do you have a 10,000 steps myth?

    With some common sense that collapses to 5 miles, or a bit more if your steps are longer.

    Or in German: that is close to 10km, as steps usually are shorter than 1m, make it 8km?

    Common sense ... my impression is, it vanished somehow magically after I was born.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      As TFS mentions, the choice of 10,000 is probably 50% too high: morbidity reductions seem to plateau around 7,000 steps (3500 paces, which some people would spell "passes") per day, which is more like 6 km. Slashdotters are, like you, known for either not reading TFS or not applying common sense before commenting.

      Both steps/paces and distance are only rough approximations for an exercise goal: jogging, and moreso running, usually means fewer steps per distance, and steps per minute does not change much from

      • I did apply common sense.
        Hence my comment.

        Or was I unclear in pointing out that 10,000 steps is to much?

        Nice analysis.

  • That explains it (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday July 24, 2025 @04:44AM (#65541682)

    Always suspected the real reason all those people in the Wegovy commercials lost weight was because of all their marching around town. :-)

    • Always suspected the real reason all those people in the Wegovy commercials lost weight was because of all their marching around town. :-)

      Looking at the side effects, they might not be marching too long.

      • No, they still march... it's just that sometimes it's into the nearest bathroom...

        (Note: I'm not intending to mock people on Wegovy, Ozempic, etc. If it works for you overall, that's the bottom line.)

        • No, they still march... it's just that sometimes it's into the nearest bathroom...

          (Note: I'm not intending to mock people on Wegovy, Ozempic, etc. If it works for you overall, that's the bottom line.)

          I'm all for its use in diabetics who use low therapeutic doses. But the people using that stuff to lose weight are playing a game with Pancreatitis, and muscle mass loss along with the fat. Including one's heart. https://www.sciencealert.com/d... [sciencealert.com].

          We do also have some claims semaglutide might cause pancreatic cancer. The standard answer is that Researchers say that it doesn't, but further studies are needed to find the long term effects. I'm not feeling warm and fuzzy about that one. All this people t

  • Cardio is good, and walking around is a decent way to achieve that goal if you aren't terribly ambitious. People are living pretty long (in some cases) and need to think about long term muscular and skeletal health. Nothing sadder than seeing people who can't even get up anymore on their own. Or who fall and break hips leading to a rapid decline in health.

    A step regimen might keep you off a walker (for awhile), but even body weight training will go a long way to keeping you truly mobile.

  • tracking more than 160,000 people for up to two decades..... Really..... Who, what, when and where did people sign up for these studies ????

    • tracking more than 160,000 people for up to two decades..... Really..... Who, what, when and where did people sign up for these studies ????

      Bought my first internet connected pedometer twenty-five years ago. (Sportbrain)

      As far as who signed up for this study? That’s probably easy to answer. Everyone that blindly clicked “I Agree” over the last quarter century of pedometer pimping.

      • My insurance company gave me kickbacks for a while for meeting monthly step count goals through a program they called Omada. I still have the scale, but the program went away after a while.

        The fine print of that agreement opted me in to giving away the metrics that I collected. So, I am sure the insurance company was selling that data to researchers and whatnot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      People willingly sign up for fitness tracking apps and web sites all the time. They probably just didn't bother to read the Privacy Policy saying that they're selling that data to anyone interested in it.

  • Count vs Frequency (Score:3)

    by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Thursday July 24, 2025 @10:11AM (#65542206) Homepage

    I'm sure this is already known but the absolute count is way way secondary to frequency. If you do 20 minutes of activity and are sedentary the rest of the day, this is far worse for metabolism and health than 2 minutes of activity every hour.

    The only thing a higher number of steps proves is that your frequency probably has to be higher to get there.

  • 2,500 steps can be a walk around the block? no, that would be some hundreds of steps.

  • I'm generally doing 10k steps per day, weather permitting and some days up to 20k. 2500 steps is days that I'm not doing any kind of walking. 1500 would be days that I'm sick and in bed most of the day. What's the key to being able to stick with? Probably the Apple Watch but more importantly - no little kids that I have to take care of. I tried to do 10k when the kids were little and that was a chore.

  • It's amazing to read all the comments saying that this is B.S. when they have no data to back it up. At best, they only have anecdotal evidence from their own experience. Meanwhile, a study of 160 THOUSAND people says otherwise.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Humans don't actually recognize quantities larger than three or four. Any bigger and you have to abstract it by counting one or two at a time. You might think you can recognize larger quantities without counting, but if you think about it they're things generally arranged into known patters: spots on a die for example, and you're recognizing the pattern, not the quantity.

      So we can appreciate our own experience, and maybe an anecdote or two from a few close friends or family. After that it's all abstract.

  • You insensitive clod!

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