That’s a lot less than the ubiquitous target of 10,000 steps a day — a goal many people have a hard time reaching. “Ten thousand steps was always an arbitrary number,” says senior study author Katherine Owen, PhD, of the University of Sydney in Australia. “It originated in Japan as part of a marketing campaign leading into the Tokyo Olympics where they chose 10,000 steps. It was catchy and memorable, and it really stuck.”
How Many Steps a Day, Now?
To see whether people really need 10,000 steps to improve their health, Dr. Owen and colleagues examined data from 57 studies including more than 160,000 adults to assess the connections between daily step counts and a wide variety of health outcomes.
Compared with taking 2,000 steps a day, hitting 7,000 steps was associated with a 47 percent lower risk of premature death from all causes, according to findings published in The Lancet Public Health.
The study also found several other health benefits of getting 7,000 steps a day compared with 2,000 steps:
- 25 percent lower risk of developing heart disease
- 47 percent lower odds of dying from cardiovascular disease
- 37 percent lower chance of dying from cancer
- 14 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes
- 38 percent lower risk of developing dementia
- 22 percent lower chance of experiencing symptoms of depression
- 28 percent lower risk of falls
How Long Does It Take to Walk 7,000 Steps a Day?
Getting these results might take a little more than an hour of walking a day, says Keith Baar, PhD, an exercise physiology professor at the University of California Davis who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“An average person walks around 100 steps a minute,” Dr. Baar says. “Therefore, walking a total of just 70 minutes would get you the necessary amount.”
Every single step you take counts towards this total — even just walking to the bathroom to brush your teeth or going to the kitchen for more coffee — so you may need to spend a lot less time than you think to get to 7,000 steps a day, says I-Min Lee, MD, ScD, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“If you did not move at all the whole day, to take 7,000 steps would require about 70 minutes,” Dr. Lee says. But the average American, who gets about 5,000 steps a day just going through their usual routine, would only need to find time for about 20 minutes a day to walk the extra 2,000 steps they don’t habitually get, Lee says.
Easy Ways to Track Your Daily Step Count
Thanks to smartphones, it’s incredibly easy to see how many steps you get each day without trying, and track your effort to get more than that if your normal total is below 7,000, says Seth Martin, MD, a professor and preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who wasn’t involved in the new study. Or you can go low-tech and guesstimate your steps, says Martin, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“Walking at a moderate pace yields about 100 to 120 steps per minute,” Dr. Martin says. So you can guess your total steps based on the number of minutes you walk, Martin says. Or, you can guess your total steps based on how many miles you walk, and assume each mile is roughly 2,000 to 2,500 steps depending on your pace.
If counting steps is too much stress, there are also a lot of ways to build more steps into your daily routine, Martin says: walking after meals, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking farther away from your destination, or pacing during calls instead of sitting at your desk.
One of the most reliable ways to get those steps, however, may be at the pet store or the pound, Baar says. “I think that the best way is to get a dog,” Baar says. “You then have to walk at least twice a day no matter the weather.”