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Traditionally we have heard the famous figure of 10,000 steps a day. However, there doesn’t seem to be much scientific evidence to support that number. We should also take into account what objective we are pursuing: lose weight, maintain our weight, improve our physical fitness… each of them will have different needs. Let’s try to answer the million dollar question: How many steps a day should I take?
- Daily steps to lose weight
As we explained in this article , walking can be a good auxiliary tool if you want to lose weight. We insist on “auxiliary” because the only necessary and sufficient tool to lose weight is calorie deficit. Walking can help you achieve that caloric deficit, and, in this sense, the more steps you can take, the better. However, as we see in this study , there are benefits below 10,000 steps, so don’t worry if you don’t have time or can’t get to 10,000 for some reason.
Chart credit: Flow High Performance YouTube Channel
- Steps to improve your physical fitness
Walking is a low-intensity activity, which brings us certain benefits, but it also has its drawbacks. To improve our cardio, it is necessary to exercise with a certain intensity, and unfortunately, we cannot trade intensity for volume in this case. So, if we want to improve our cardio, the key will be more in the minutes of intensity. In this sense, there are many ways to train cardio and one of them can be doing sprints, as we explained in this article .
- Steps to improve your health
If your goal is to improve your health and reduce your risk of mortality, this meta-study shows that walking is, in fact, very effective:
However, we observe that the additional benefits begin to decrease after 7,500 steps, with very decreasing returns beyond 13,500 so, in this case, much more is not going to be much better.
In short: walking is objectively beneficial for losing weight and improving our overall health, but we should not obsess over the 10,000 step mark. Most of the profits will come in around 7,500, so if you don’t have time to reach 10,000, don’t worry too much😉