10,000 steps a day? Maybe not.
How far you should actually walk may be a surprise.
Good morning, and welcome to the fitness inspired edition of Morning Musely.
I didn’t go to the gym this morning.
Unsurprisingly perhaps dear reader, I could have written that sentence every single day for the past 6 years.
I like the idea of fitness but hate anything to do with moving faster than a walk. I don’t count steps, but my wife does religiously.
However she’s been fooled. All these years thinking 10,000 steps a day was the target.
Why does she and perhaps you think this is the magic number?
Marketing, of course.
The 10,000 number was dreamt up by Japanese company Yamasa to sell pedometers around the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
By the way, if you are doing 10,000 steps a day - or 12,000 or 15,000 - then good luck to you. Far be it from me to stop you being healthy. I just wanna give you the facts.
In The Lancet Public Health last week, a study was published into the matter. Researchers analysed data from more than 160,000 adults to look at how risks of serious health problems varied with the numbers of steps taken daily.
This was reported in the AFR Weekend:
“Overall mortality for people walking 7,000 steps was 47% lower than those who only walked 2,000. Risks for those who did 7,000 steps fell for health problems, including death from cardivascular disease and cancer, as well as the incidence if type 2 diabetes and dementia”.
Lead Author of the study, Professor Ding Ding from University of Sydney doesn’t want to encourage anyone who is currently doing 10,000 steps to go back to 7,000. “However beyond around 7,000 steps the additional health gain for each additional 1,000 steps starts to become smaller, so there’s less ‘return on investment’.”
Happily, I also read about this really interesting concept called ‘Japanese Walking’.
From The Washington Post:
One particular technique, known as interval walking training (IWT) or “Japanese walking,” is getting renewed attention after going viral on TikTok.
Nearly 20 years ago a team led by Hiroshi Nose and other researchers from Japan published a study that found that middle-aged and older people who did high-intensity interval walking had lower blood pressure, stronger thigh muscles, and better aerobic capacity than walkers the same age who kept a more moderate, continuous pace.
In the study, the volunteers did three minutes of fast walking followed by three minutes at a slower pace, for 30 minutes per day at least four days per week.
“One of the most surprising findings was that IWT markedly increased physical fitness and decreased blood pressure after the 5-month intervention whereas these improvements were not observed in the moderate-intensity continuous walking group,” said Shizue Masuki, a researcher on the team and professor at Shinshu University Graduate School of Medicine in Matsumoto.
No matter how many steps you today just follow my golden rule - keep putting one foot in front of the other.
See you next Monday Morning,
Wade