You joke but perhaps we need to (scientifically) find the minimum number of steps for a reasonable lifespan in tabular form for a given weight, lifestyle, diet, occupation and ethnicity. The law of diminishing returns will apply after a certain amount of physical activity. So will negative consequences of too much exercise where you damage your limbs.
Untangling cause and effect (it clearly works both directions) is near-impossible, the intensity of the steps obviously also matters, and anyone trying to exercise to the statistical minimum before diminishing returns kick in probably has other issues.
I don't think many people need to worry about limb damage from over-walking, and the ones who have already experienced limb damage need to find alternative exercise rather than minmaxing steps...
The absolute worse thing you can do for your knees and other joints is be obese. The constant weight and stress wrecks you. This is also why young, fit males come out of the military with wrecked knees, not because of all the running, but because they march around constantly carrying 100+ lb packs, on bodies that would be at a healthy weight of 150lbs.
There's even evidence that distance running strengthens your knees, contrary to common knowledge. https://archive.ph/utsUF
Worrying about too much exercise for the average person is like worrying about drinking too much water on a desert hike.
Isn't that overthinking it big time? Biologically humans have evolved to walk roughly 10-15km a day.
You really have to overdo it to get to negative consequences of light physical activities such as walking. Just talking a one hour walk every day surely doesn't get you anywhere near the red zone, provided you're otherwise reasonably healthy.
There’s not much science for the ultramarathon folks, but in general more is better. This talk of negative consequences of too much exercise has no grounding in reality.
The people I see that cite the risks of "over exercising" are exclusively people in bad shape. My sister in law, sedentary and textbook obese, insists that running is dangerous for anyone due to the "extra stress it puts on knees." It's just an excuse people use to convince themselves that they're doing the right thing by not moving much. I see it too with people not eating healthy foods like vegetables because they read somewhere that the pesticide residue or whatever is worse for you than just eating processed food all day.
I think it’s important to note that you are assuming a gradual increase in activity over time as well as adequate food and rest between sessions. In the limit case things like rhabdomyolysis definitely exist and in the less-extreme case, you can have problems with connective tissue injuries from increasing the load or volume of exercise too fast. Over the long term, you can also have health problems and injuries caused by doing too much exercise relative to how much food and rest you are getting. All of these are real possibilities if someone started an intense exercise program after 20 years of completely sedentary life as an adult.
That said, we are discussing this in the context of walking a bit more, which should be very well-tolerated for pretty much everyone as long as they don’t have other significant health problems and work up gradually. For example, if you take 1000 steps a day, space out the increase by each week increasing your daily steps by 500-1000 steps a day until you reach 10000 steps a day over the course of a few months (temporarily pause or reverse the increases if you see anything other than passing muscular discomfort).
This also explains how ultramarathon (or other “extreme” physical activities) can be tolerated without much issue—bodies are very good at adapting to the loads that are placed on them as long as that increase is gradual and they have enough food and rest to rebuild after particularly intense bouts of activity.
A further corollary is that over the long term, being sedentary is not well-tolerated at all, so maintaining a certain baseline level of physical activity is definitely a better idea and as long as your body isn’t giving you any feedback to the contrary, you shouldn’t avoid high loads or intense activity just out of abstract fear of injury.
A running friend of long standing--we met in the last half mile of a 50-miler in 1982--said a few years ago that her knees aren't up to much more than two or three miles with the dogs lately. Now, she was a much more serious ultra-runner than I ever was: I took away from the 50 the knowledge that I really didn't enjoy that distance; she did at least one 100 (in less than 24 hours) and a multi-day run longer than that.
But as HN likes to day, the plural of anecdote is not data. Nor the dual: but for what it's worth, I haven't run a marathon since 1986, not have I stopped running.
> An average person has a stride length of approximately 2.1 to 2.5 feet. That means that it takes over 2,000 steps to walk one mile and 10,000 steps would be almost 5 miles.
It's good advice though. I used to not move around a lot and it was having an impact. These days I build walking into my routine. I walk to work, about 5km. Takes me about 55 minutes. I try to do this several times per week. Sometimes I take public transport or the bike if I'm in a hurry. Usually I walk back as well. And when I'm working from home, I take a walk during lunch break or at the end of the day.
It took the covid lockdowns for me to discover that I actually enjoy this stuff. I put some headphones on and listen some podcasts. I can't focus on a podcast at home or while working. I get distracted or I start doing other things and lose focus. When I walk, I listen. So when I want to listen to a podcast, I just go for a walk now. And if it's a long podcast, I just walk a bit longer.
Anyway, this stuff does seem to work for me. And I don't even mind doing it. Win win.
I heard that the reason behind the popular 10k step number was the first step counter on the market which was limited to 9999 steps, and people saw that as a challenge to reach.
Meanwhile this is more like the 5th study I've heard of which talks about some measure of exercise at least 1-2 times a week, like 20+ minutes of cycling.
I wonder how remote work has impacted the average number of steps per day. I normally get ~5k steps from my commute (walk from home to train, walk from train to office and vice versa) without doing anything else. On days I work from home I'm definitely much more sedentary. Yes I can go on a walk to compensate, but I usually don't...
Biggest change for me was going from a city, where there was some walking every day—the train stop, grocery, meetups with friends—to the suburbs. Doesn't matter if it's WFH or commute, in most 'burbs the only required walk is to the garage.
Working from home has increased my physical activity. I'm able to go to parks and walking trails near by during breaks. Weight lift during lunch break and since I no longer lose 2 hours a day to commuting I'm able play sports like golf and hockey more frequently, not relying only on weekends to do these sports is amazing. Golf more because I am available more during day light time and hockey more because I am able to get other things done which frees up my night time.
I highly recommend “walking to lunch”. Assuming you eat at home just pick a certain location nearby to walk to and back either before or after you eat, tying it to lunch made it more reliable, at least for me. I don’t do it anymore now that I have the habit down and walk plenty every day but it really helped me get started.
My wife is working in healthcare and I'm working from home and we go for walks during lunch before she heads out for the evening shift. Not only am I getting up and moving around, we're spending more meaningful time together. If I was commuting to an office every morning, we would hardly see each other during the week.
During the pandemic era, I deliberately went for a one to two hour walk to nowhere in particular every evening after work for precisely this reason (at the height of the restrictions in Ireland, you had to stay within 2km of home, so I went in circles). Honestly it's about all that kept me going.
There probably should be data on this from Fitbit or something, no? Obviously biasd from the type of person who has a Fitbit but maybe Google or apple has less biased surveillance data...
Ain't going to help ...you're going to die anyway.. so best you just move to Brazil and travel to the Amazon River and build a raft and live on it and catch fish and pick fruit and stare up at the stars every night till you get old and decrepit and wonder at the marvelous universe that you were born in until one day you see no more and you feel no more and you are no more.. instead of just striving and working out and stepping steps and earning and working and working and earning.. just my thoughts.. but you do you
Because I believe that in my essence I am essentially just information contained in my brain.. and I believe that if such information can be sufficiently preserved for a sufficiently long period of time, then I believe that such information can be recovered in sufficient quantities so that the person that I am can be revived or live again some other means or ways.. that might mean immortality for me because information could be considered immortal.. therefore I signed up for cryonics, the practice of freezing the brain after death so that the brain can be preserved for long periods of time in order for some revival to take place in the distant future.. if there were no such thing as cryonics, I would be floating on a raft in the Amazon right now, because there really isn't much point to all this other stuff in my opinion
If anyone thinks this, I sincerely hope you re-evaluate. The difference between doing sports and exercise and doing none is often being disabled or in pain in your 30s and 40s, versus being in near peak physical shape. I meet too many people who assume that debilitation comes with being aged 38-50.
Recently a got fairly basic, but fully functional smart/sports watch. It counts steps, heart rate, "intensity minutes", distance, GPS, etc.
I got it because I was hoping that having a neat gadget to track this stuff would help motivate me to get in those extra exercise minutes. It turns out that it works for me. Seeing the distance/step numbers go up satisfies the little "make graph go up" gremlin in my brain.
I'm getting this effect even better now with smartwatch tracked runs and activities uploaded of Strava, which has a premium feature that tracks a "fitness score" alongside with a fatigue score, based on the intensity of the workouts you record. https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/216918477-Fitne...
It's really motivating to see that number go up, or at least maintain it and build more area under the curve.
The Strava social component is also motivating because it adds some accountability with friends seeing and liking your workouts, and then noticing if you stop.
It can definitely be motivating, though some features are more "one size fits all", like the intensity minute counter. I know a person who gets maybe one intensity minute per week when it should be 300+, simply because the heart rate is lower on average than the manufacturer expects. Meanwhile my count is usually doubled because it counts very intense minutes twice and 99% of the time I exceed the seemingly hardcoded threshold while doing sports.
Mine fortunately has an "automatic" mode for determining those thresholds, as well a way to manually configure the thresholds (which sounds like it would be useful for the two cases you mentioned)
Even better than the step count is the resting heart rate.
Mine went from mid 60s down to upper 40s within 6 months of getting my fitbit.
I started hiking regularly, and seeing that number drop consistently felt rewarding.
I did this when unemployed and hiked Arizona mountains almost daily, so this probably isn't typical, but it was part of a lifestyle shift towards fitness which has been wonderful.
This just in: the human body, after billions of years of evolving to be a active, walking organism, is not well suited to a sedentary, seated lifestyle.
Seriously, why would we expect the sedentary, monotonous life of office jobs or being couch potatoes to be good for us? This study only looks at duration of life, but quality of life is huge, too. Exposure to sunlight, using your body, socialization, and eating real food, all do wonders for our health, physical and mental.
This isn’t new information. The standard of 3 MET exercise for 2.5-5 hours a week (16k steps at 2.5 mph is in the middle of that range) has been around for a while. It’s in multiple country’s exercise guidelines, which is about as formal as you can get.
Comprehensive literature review has established that 2.5 hours a week at 3 MET reduces your risk of death by cardiovascular event by 70%, and there’s plenty of evidence for other benefits. The more you spread out the exercise the better.
For the last 400 days, I walked at least 10 000 steps daily every day - in heat, frost, snow or rain. Sometimes much more, so the total sum exceeds 5 million steps.
My immune system has improved visibly, but all that activity didn't have any measurable effect on my weight, which has fluctuated randomly around the same set point as in the years before.
I wonder whether all the putative health effect stems from the immune system improvement.
It found a correlation between cardiovascular health and walking a certain amount a week. This does not at all suggest causation. I'm not nitpicking here. The most likely reason for this is that people who have a significantly more healthy life style have better cardiovascular health while also happening to move significantly more. Just getting up and walking 8k steps twice a week and otherwise having unhealthy lifestyle of the control group is possibly going to do nothing for your cardiovascular health. Claiming anything else needs much different evidence than the linked study.
Edit: I'm not saying walking is bad for you. That's just as wrong. I'm saying just walking won't do much for you. Get a more healthy lifestyle. Cardiovascular health will follow and you'll notice that 16k steps or something comparable will look small compared to what your active/healthy lifestyle will do.
Most likely it's a feedback loop that goes both ways. Generally healthy —> activity is easier and more pleasurable —> exercise makes you healthier —> being healthy makes exercise more viscerally rewarding, and so on.
I've had several fitness trackers that never convinced me I needed to exercise more. But when I paired that with a Constant Glucose Monitor, that made a huge impact.
You don't need to push hard all the time, in fact most of your exercise should be in aerobic mode, very little in anaerobic high bpm range. Getting 45 minutes of moderate movement 4-5x/week will improve your glucose management.
This is important because poor glucose management is a root cause of deterioration. Diabetics are the extreme example, but wild glucose swings are also causing deterioration in non-diabetics.
does "Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Prolong Your Life" by more net time than it takes to walk 8K steps? cuz I'm not looking to have the part of my life spent not step walking reduced just so I can spend more time walking steps.
64 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadDoctors: Just 10,000 steps of walking every day is fine too!
Doctors: Ok, how about 8,000 steps only once or twice a week. Can you do that?
Doctors: For the love of god, please just get off the couch every once in a while...
I don't think many people need to worry about limb damage from over-walking, and the ones who have already experienced limb damage need to find alternative exercise rather than minmaxing steps...
There's even evidence that distance running strengthens your knees, contrary to common knowledge. https://archive.ph/utsUF
Worrying about too much exercise for the average person is like worrying about drinking too much water on a desert hike.
You really have to overdo it to get to negative consequences of light physical activities such as walking. Just talking a one hour walk every day surely doesn't get you anywhere near the red zone, provided you're otherwise reasonably healthy.
That said, we are discussing this in the context of walking a bit more, which should be very well-tolerated for pretty much everyone as long as they don’t have other significant health problems and work up gradually. For example, if you take 1000 steps a day, space out the increase by each week increasing your daily steps by 500-1000 steps a day until you reach 10000 steps a day over the course of a few months (temporarily pause or reverse the increases if you see anything other than passing muscular discomfort).
This also explains how ultramarathon (or other “extreme” physical activities) can be tolerated without much issue—bodies are very good at adapting to the loads that are placed on them as long as that increase is gradual and they have enough food and rest to rebuild after particularly intense bouts of activity.
A further corollary is that over the long term, being sedentary is not well-tolerated at all, so maintaining a certain baseline level of physical activity is definitely a better idea and as long as your body isn’t giving you any feedback to the contrary, you shouldn’t avoid high loads or intense activity just out of abstract fear of injury.
But as HN likes to day, the plural of anecdote is not data. Nor the dual: but for what it's worth, I haven't run a marathon since 1986, not have I stopped running.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Historical
It took the covid lockdowns for me to discover that I actually enjoy this stuff. I put some headphones on and listen some podcasts. I can't focus on a podcast at home or while working. I get distracted or I start doing other things and lose focus. When I walk, I listen. So when I want to listen to a podcast, I just go for a walk now. And if it's a long podcast, I just walk a bit longer.
Anyway, this stuff does seem to work for me. And I don't even mind doing it. Win win.
Meanwhile this is more like the 5th study I've heard of which talks about some measure of exercise at least 1-2 times a week, like 20+ minutes of cycling.
Although the studies I glanced at say something like:
<2000 steps, couch potato, certain doom
>2000 greatest reduction in risk
6,000–9,000 steps per day 50% reduced risk of CVD for 60+ year olds <=== you want to get used to this as your baseline to be a healthy silver fox
10k steps, marketing for original pedometer
20k steps, best way to lose weight, almost nobody does this daily :)
Here is a depressing video High School Fitness (1962): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGa6BPj3Mcw
And the easiest one to compare is of course US basic training standards that have gone down each time they have been revised since WWII.
That made me start running every day.
I am now on day 240 of my daily run streak (https://www.runeveryday.com/)
Sounds like fun but I don't know if I could stay motivated in the winter.
I wear pretty much the same clothes even if it is -10C. Just need a beanie and some thin gloves.
But it may help to start running during summer. Once you are past 3-4 weeks of running it is harder to stop than to continue.
Though I do get a few runs in on an indoor track.
There's a vocal group though, that will tell you how – finally – they're able to hit the gym four times a week.
It's less, but people think it's more. It might be true for some, some of the time for some months, but of course movement will decrease.
If you already are, what are the rates like for Starlink's jungle-rafting plan?
I got it because I was hoping that having a neat gadget to track this stuff would help motivate me to get in those extra exercise minutes. It turns out that it works for me. Seeing the distance/step numbers go up satisfies the little "make graph go up" gremlin in my brain.
It's really motivating to see that number go up, or at least maintain it and build more area under the curve.
The Strava social component is also motivating because it adds some accountability with friends seeing and liking your workouts, and then noticing if you stop.
Mine went from mid 60s down to upper 40s within 6 months of getting my fitbit.
I started hiking regularly, and seeing that number drop consistently felt rewarding.
I did this when unemployed and hiked Arizona mountains almost daily, so this probably isn't typical, but it was part of a lifestyle shift towards fitness which has been wonderful.
Seriously, why would we expect the sedentary, monotonous life of office jobs or being couch potatoes to be good for us? This study only looks at duration of life, but quality of life is huge, too. Exposure to sunlight, using your body, socialization, and eating real food, all do wonders for our health, physical and mental.
Comprehensive literature review has established that 2.5 hours a week at 3 MET reduces your risk of death by cardiovascular event by 70%, and there’s plenty of evidence for other benefits. The more you spread out the exercise the better.
For the last 400 days, I walked at least 10 000 steps daily every day - in heat, frost, snow or rain. Sometimes much more, so the total sum exceeds 5 million steps.
My immune system has improved visibly, but all that activity didn't have any measurable effect on my weight, which has fluctuated randomly around the same set point as in the years before.
I wonder whether all the putative health effect stems from the immune system improvement.
It found a correlation between cardiovascular health and walking a certain amount a week. This does not at all suggest causation. I'm not nitpicking here. The most likely reason for this is that people who have a significantly more healthy life style have better cardiovascular health while also happening to move significantly more. Just getting up and walking 8k steps twice a week and otherwise having unhealthy lifestyle of the control group is possibly going to do nothing for your cardiovascular health. Claiming anything else needs much different evidence than the linked study.
Edit: I'm not saying walking is bad for you. That's just as wrong. I'm saying just walking won't do much for you. Get a more healthy lifestyle. Cardiovascular health will follow and you'll notice that 16k steps or something comparable will look small compared to what your active/healthy lifestyle will do.
You don't need to push hard all the time, in fact most of your exercise should be in aerobic mode, very little in anaerobic high bpm range. Getting 45 minutes of moderate movement 4-5x/week will improve your glucose management.
This is important because poor glucose management is a root cause of deterioration. Diabetics are the extreme example, but wild glucose swings are also causing deterioration in non-diabetics.