'I'm a walking expert and you don't need to be doing 10,000 steps a day'

A health expert has given valuable insight into how people should be approaching their daily step goal. Not everyone needs to achieve the magic number of 10,000 steps every day

The famous piece of health advice that people should be aiming to do 10,000 steps every day may not be the right course of action for a person hoping to get a bit fitter, an expert has claimed.

The magic number is often cited as one of the best ways a person can ensure they get enough daily exercise, but people come in all different shapes and sizes so the true figure is more complicated than that. Recent studies, The Independent reported, said that medical experts and researchers have tried to hit upon a more perfect figure, often coming up with suggestions of 7,000 to 8,000 steps.

Dr Elroy Aguiar, an assistant professor of exercise science at The University of Alabama said: “It’s interesting how that number is repeated across many of these studies… This figure is associated with reduced risks of mortality, cancer and cardiovascular disease.” The figure of 10,000 steps could be linked to previous marketing campaigns around health and fitness. It is an easy number to remember and an achievable but worthy goal for a lot of people.

But it may be more effective to take fewer steps at a brisker pace. Researchers at the University of Granada are one of the teams suggesting a target of 8,000 steps may be enough after all. Other studies have suggested fewer steps may be enough. Overall, the more steps you do is likely to lead to better health than doing none at all, but there may be a point for a person where the number of steps they do starts to have less of an impact.

“If you want optimal benefits for the time you put in, you have most of the gain already if you’ve done 8,000 – then there are marginal or incremental gains beyond this point,” Dr Aguiar said. “And in terms of meeting the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) physical activity guidelines of about 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity physical activity, or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity, those numbers translate to about 7,000-8,000 steps per day. There’s a lot of sense to it, and it’s aligning quite well with what the new studies are showing.”

Dr Aguiar said the 10,000 step goal may not be based on a huge amount of research, it is unlikely to harm anyone if they set that as their goal. But different people should have different goals based on their fitness levels, body features and overall exercise routine. “One thing we need to be conscious of is setting realistic targets,” says Dr Aguiar. “If someone is doing 4,000 or 5,000 steps per day, and you tell them to do 10,000, that’s doubling their amount of daily activity, which can be problematic or even demotivating.”

He continued: “A lot of modern wearable devices like Garmin and Google watches look at your current level of activity then try to bump you up by a certain percentage. So, instead of setting an arbitrary goal like 10,000, your device would track that you were doing 5,000 steps a day, then it might prompt you to do 10-20 per cent more than that to improve the amount of exercise you do as a gradual progression.”

“Generally speaking, if you improve your baseline steps by about 2,000 per day, which would for most people equates to 10 or 20 per cent, that’s a sufficient amount of extra activity to improve health markers like blood pressure and body composition. But obviously we do want people to progress eventually to 7,000-8,000, and then ultimately to 10,000-plus, because that’s where we know the best benefits occur.”