The number of steps you should walk every day to start seeing benefits to your health is lower than previously thought, according to the largest analysis to investigate this. The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, found that walking at least 3967 steps a day started to reduce the risk of dying from any cause, and 2337 steps a day reduced the risk of dying from diseases of the heart and blood vessels (cardiovascular disease).
I read about a woman who died after a tree branch fell on her during a walk so there’s that…
She was only 3966 steps away from her door.
You read about her because that’s a heck of a lot rarer and more interesting as a headline than “woman dies in car crash” or “woman dies of heart attack”.
Also sometimes trees fall on cars or houses when people are in them, too.
Edit: I am probably taking your comment far too seriously, admittedly.
Part of a tree fell on my house. It was quite loud, do not recommend.
Oh no! I only got 3966 steps tod
I’m pretty sure you meant tod as in “today”, but it’s doubly funny because “Tod” also means “Death” in German (among other regional languages, probably), so I read it as you lamenting your lack of steps and then just simply popping out of existence with a Black&White like “death” sound effect.
RIP in peace Xtallll :( They didn’t even have time to finish their sentence before they died! Killed mid-word…A tragedy!
I guess it depends on where you walk too.
And, more generally, where you’re walking through - going for a jog through an asbestos mine or corpo toxin dumping site prolly won’t extend your lifespan!
Assuming it controls for other factors? If you have cancer you probably don’t walk a whole lot.
I read the headline and my immediate thought was “is this controlled for socioeconomic class?”
I guess I’m reading the paper
Haha, obviously, this needs to correlate with other habits/available resources too. Otherwise, people in the past would live longer than people in the present.
I love some “bad” food, but I do walk a lot. I suppose I might live longer than people who love bad food as much as I do but don’t exercise.
Damn, I’ve been doing 3,966 steps, I’m fucked.
Sorry communist
It’s quite a feat if I get fewer than 4000 steps in any given day, and I have a desk job.
I remember reading about this village in Japan I think it was, where people had an amazingly high life expectancy. They would walk a lot, it was a part of their culture.
Guess I’ll live till 100+ then. Lol
Wow, I know a lot of people that died and they were quite the walking enthusiasts. Some of them must have only walked 3966 steps a day. They were just one step away from immortality, perhaps?
Yes that’s how statistics work. If the statistics say 77% of people won’t die if they walk more than 4000 steps, but you see someone who walked 4000 steps who died, that means the study is fake. (Made up numbers to illustrate why anecdotes are useless unless claims are for 100%)
Yes, this new type of statistical reality in this parallel universe I’ve stumbled into, where people don’t die if they walk, is fascinating, isn’t it? If I see a casino, I’m definitely going all in on the roulette wheel.
Everyone dies eventually. Even the walking enthusiasts. There is no escape from DOOOOOOOOM! “Ask not for whom the bell tolls…”
the more you walk, the lower your risk of death
So if I never stop walking I’ll never die!? Awesome!
Out of curiosity, how do step measurements like this translate to jogging/running?
Seems like it should be similar. You just get your steps over quicker. It takes the same amount of energy to walk a mile as to jog a mile as to run a mile.
I think the biomechanics of walking and running makes this a little more complicated than that. The efficiency of moving your body in different ways is different. I’m certainly no expert, but if I’m reading this study right (it’s open access so feel free to check me), then walking will pretty much always use less energy to cover a given distance than running/jogging, unless you force yourself to “fast-walk” at high speeds where a running/jogging gait would feel more natural.
I’m also pretty sure that for a given distance you would count fewer steps while running than you would if you walked the same distance, since each step covers a lot more distance when you run. So in terms of step counting, steps taken while running should be “worth” a lot more in terms of exercise than steps taken while walking.
In either case, my understanding of the evidence is that it has pretty consistently been shown across many different studies that almost any amount of daily exercise – walking, jogging, cycling, etc – is way, way better than no daily exercise at all. This study seems to fall nicely into that pattern.
This is a really cool old study that looks at how people switch to a run in order save energy - at a certain speed (which differs among individuals) it is less costly to run than to walk. We switch to a run because running uses less energy than walking would.
Forcing someone to walk when they’d rather run, or run when they’d rather walk, burns more calories. (And causes injury, but hey, calories burned, baby!)
I remember learning about this applied to various animals, too, and how this plays into the idea of humans being efficient at catching critters to eat because we can jog along for ages and wear them out. We just don’t stop, and eventually the prey drops with exhaustion. BBQ time! Humans: 1, Antelope: 0.
Yeah, persistence hunting! It’s cool stuff.
I remember learning about this applied to various animals
Another one of the studies I found while googling around about this yesterday mentioned something about kangaroos right at the end, and apparently their fast hopping gate is especially efficient. The mention seemed to come a bit out of the blue right at the end of the conclusion, but I was also just skimming so I may have missed a discussion of kangaroo gaits earlier in the paper.
