Enlightened
Why 10,000 steps a day is nonsense
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10,000 steps a day should be healthy. This assessment goes back to an advertisement! This is how many steps you should really run each day.
Fitness bracelets have been in vogue for years – and whenever the wearer has walked 10,000 steps a day, the bracelet draws their attention to this with a special display and congratulates them happily. But how did this ambitious 10.00 step rule come about? To blame is an advertisement that is over 50 years old, how Mirror online reported.
In the beginning there was advertising
The Yamasa company brought the first portable pedometer onto the market in 1964, because at that time the Olympic Games in Japan had created a real movement hype. The device was called “Manpokei” which means “the 10,000-step counter” in German. As a result, the company promoted the pedometer by claiming that 10,000 steps a day is healthy. However, Yamasa never backed up this claim with a study.
And this is where it gets strange: Without further serious checks, the belief prevailed and became even adopted by the World Health Organization (“WHO”). But that could soon change, as some studies have now been conducted that suggest that 10,000 steps a day is excessive. Accordingly, you could do a lot of good for your health with significantly fewer steps every day.
Are 7,500 steps enough?
A new one just appeared examination of Harvard Medical School in the specialist journal Jama Internal Medicinein which the researchers compared the number of daily steps with the risk of death. The data was collected from 16,000 US women with an average age of 72 years. The study conclusion: Women who walked at least 4,400 steps a day had a lower risk of death after four years than women who walked 2,700 steps a day. This so-called statistical advantage increased up to a limit of 7,500 steps per day. Those who ran even more did not have an even higher life expectancy.
However, the study has a catch: It is not entirely clear whether the women in the second group only exercised less because they were already ill. Everyone had stated that they could take a daily walk, but not how far they could actually walk.
Unclear study situation
So far there has not been a very clear conclusion as to how many steps a day really make sense. But several study results suggest that the 7,500 steps from the new study are not entirely out of thin air – According to these studies, the range is 6,000 to 8,000 daily steps, which are said to have a positive effect on cardiovascular health. But there are others too Investigationswho even recommend a daily step amount of between 15,000 to 18,000.
For now it can at least be said that nobody has to go crazy if they “only” manage 6,000 steps a day. In any case, the sheer number of steps does not say anything about how intense the movement actually is: For example, the effect of a long walk is different from that achieved by jogging for 30 minutes – even if the number of steps is the same for both. The rule is: you can safely push away the frustration about missing 10,000 steps and instead look forward to small successes.
Source: Spiegel.de