Walk!

Benefits of walking

Walking can help reduce your risk of many common health problems, such as:

• • Heart disease

  • Obesity

  • Diabetes

  • High blood pressure

  • Depression

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity exercises, such as brisk walking. This may be accomplished by doing 30 minutes of exercise five days a week or by just doing 10 minutes of exercise several times a day.

Walking intensity

Not all walks are created equal. It’s important to make sure your heart rate reaches a moderate-intensity level during your walk. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), moderate-intensity exercise is defined as an activity that raises the heart rate to 50–70% of your maximum heart rate. For walking, this means maintaining a pace of over 100 steps per minute.

How walking compares to running

Walking can provide many of the same health benefits as running, and with a lower risk of injury. You burn about the same number of calories walking a mile as you do when running a mile. In both cases, you are moving the same mass over the same distance. When it comes to physical activity—some is good, more is better. So how many steps do you need a day for good health?

10,000 steps per day myth

In 1965, a Japanese company called Yamasa Clock created a personal-fitness pedometer called the Manpo-kei, which means “10,000 steps meter.” The Japanese character for 10,000 looks almost like a person walking or running, which is likely how the gadget-maker came up with the name. After this point, 10,000 steps became accepted as the standard number of steps needed to remain healthy. But, is this number of steps necessary to lower mortality rates?

A study “Association of Step Volume and Intensity with All-Cause Mortality in Older Women” published in the May 29, 2019 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association looked into this question.

The researchers outfitted nearly 17,000 older women with accelerometers, allowing them to track their daily steps for a week. When they checked back in just over four years later, the results were striking: As the number of daily steps increased, the all-cause mortality rate decreased—until 7,500 steps, where the mortality rate leveled off.

In other words, 7,500 is the lowest number of steps with the highest level of health benefits, making it an ideal daily goal. Any step count above that, including the 10,000-step standard, has roughly the same outcome. At least in terms of impact on mortality, walking 7,500 steps and walking 10,000 steps appear to be pretty much equal.

Although men were not part of the testing, the results for men should be comparable.

Just walk!

Because of the undeniable benefits of exercise, it's best to get as much of it as you can manage. But getting hung up on the exact number of steps can impede health too. Don’t worry so much about walking; just walk as fast as you can for as far as you as often as you can. And one of the best places to walk is on trails. When you walk on even surface pavement, your body is repeating the exact same motions over and over. When you walk on an everchanging surface, such as a trail, your body is constantly making all kinds of adjustments to keep you balanced and on course.