Do We Really Need to Walk 10,000 Steps Every Day?

Entire television series, such as the twenty-sixth season of the American hit series The Amazing Race, have been organized around the idea of using devices like a pedometer, or a FitBit, to keep track of physical activity. Fit people get lots of exercise, the experts tell us, and activity trackers prove it, or at least they should. When the ideas that most Americans are physically active as if they walked 10,000 steps a day and most fit people are that physical active were put to the test, however, researchers got shocking results.

Where Did Experts Get the Idea That We Should All Get More Exercise?

For nearly 60 years, doctors have been telling us that physical activity is essential to good health. In 1953, the Scottish epidemiologist Jeremiah Morris observed that ticket collectors on double decker buses were 50 percent less likely than drivers of the same buses to have heart attacks. The difference in the two jobs was that the ticket collector had to climb on average about 600 steps per day. To Dr. Morris, exercise had to make the difference. In the 1960’s, when the United States anticipated another war, with the Soviet Union, the US government was eager to make sure youth stayed in shape. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson created national physical fitness awards, and in 1968 Dr. Kenneth Cooper, formerly a fitness expert for the US Air Force, invented the term “aerobics.” International standards took a while to catch up. In 1996, the World Health Organization announced that, worldwide, 6 percent of all deaths were associated with lack of exercise.

What doctors, patients, and the people who write articles about health failed to realize was that the World Health Organization was really saying that if everyone got exercise, it was highly probable that there would be 6 percent fewer deaths per year. This wasn’t the same as saying your risk of death will be 6 percent higher if you don’t exercise.

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How Did Experts Come Up with the Figure of 10,000 Steps Per Day?

Researchers have also gone about computing how much exercise, on average across the entire population, is necessary to eliminate lack of exercise as a public health concern. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control decreed that:

• Children should get an hour of physical activity every day.
• Adults should get 5 hours of moderate exercise per week, something like brisk walking, for maximum benefits, or at least 2-1/2 hours of moderate exercise per week for measurable health benefits. “Intense” exercise cuts the time requirement in half.
• A study of adults in the obesity-prone states of Louisiana and Mississippi in the United States found that 9,154 steps a day would equal one half-hour of moderate to vigorous physical activity. From this the experts concluded that sedentary people walk 7,500 steps per day or less and active people walk more than 10,000 steps per day. It didn’t hurt that at the time the recommendation was made, the most readily available pedometer was made in Japan, and it was calibrated to tell people precisely when they had walked 10,000 steps in a single day.

All of these figures, of course, are entirely arbitrary. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to walk 10,000 steps per day. It just means that the recommendation to walk 10,000 steps a day is a best guess. Or at least it was. Modern technology makes measurement a lot easier, and a recent study puts the 10,000 step a day figure in doubt.

Modern Activity and Fitness Monitors Go Way Beyond the Pedometer

At Stanford University, a team of researchers across multiple disciplines is conducting a series of tests to discover just how valid decades-old recommendations for physical activity really are. In one study they have elite athletes putting on over-the-counter fitness bands, pulse trackers, and heart-rate monitors, along with oxygen masks, before they play basketball. The researchers want to know if the activity monitors you can get at the sporting goods store really measure how hard your body is working. They also want to know if there are unique genes that make elite athletes elite, and if those genes tell us about how to treat fitness problems at the other end of the athletic spectrum.

Dr. Euan Ashley, director of the Stanford lab, notes that he treats a lot of congestive heart failure. What he has found in his studies of elite athletes is that there is not necessarily any single way to become extraordinarily fit. Different athletes use different training programs to reach their goals. Conversely, people who aren’t in good shape, and who perhaps will never be in good shape, may benefit from individually tailored programs of exercise. The 10,000 steps a day recommendation, like a single size shoe, may not fit all.

“We know exercise saves lives,” Dr. Ashley told a reporter for the Washington Post. “What we don’t know is what is the right dose.”

Finding the right dose of exercise is a task taken on by Dr. Ashley’s colleague at Stanford, Dr. Alan Yeung. Using monitors that work with  Apple’s open source Research Kit software, fitness watches, and other electronics, Dr. Yeung has recruited 53,000 people for a massive study of the second-by-second minutiae of the amounts of exercise people really get. His preliminary findings include:

• The stereotype that Americans who live along the Pacific Coast, in California, Oregon, and Washington, and Hawaii are physically more active than Americans who live elsewhere in the country turns out to be correct. However,
• Most Americans spend most of their time just sitting around, even those in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, which should be athletically their prime of life. Many Americans don’t even get up and down or move around. They spend almost all of their waking hours sitting. Even Americans who do not display signs of heart disease typically come nowhere remotely close to getting 10,000 steps (5 miles/8 kilometers) of walking every day.

Does this mean that the Unites States is just a decade away from an epidemic of heart disease among Millennial couch potatoes? Or does it mean that the old recommendations for exercise are wrong.

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If you have an iPhone, you can be part of the answer to the question. The Stanford My Heart Counts study is open to volunteers all over the world (although instructions are in English). You simply download a free app, answer a survey, and let your iPhone and a wearable device (if you have one) collect data for 7 days. Your activity will then be summarized in an activity circle, which tells you the amount of time you spend in various kinds of physical activity, and an estimate of your cardiovascular risk and heart age. You will receive an estimate of your lifetime risk of having a heart attack or stroke if you are 20 to 59, and an estimate of your risk of having a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years if you are age 40 to 79. You will also receive recommendations for improving your heart health. Using the app takes 10 to 15 minutes a day for just seven days. The researchers recommend you use the app every three months to collect ongoing data on how well you are doing.

You can participate in the My Heart Counts study if you own an iPhone. The app is free. Please see the link below for further information.