{"id":230813,"date":"2025-10-22T02:31:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T02:31:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/230813\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T02:31:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T02:31:06","slug":"is-4000-steps-enough-a-new-study-suggests-it-may-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/230813\/","title":{"rendered":"Is 4,000 Steps Enough? A New Study Suggests It May Be"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019ve probably heard this one a few times before: Research suggests that exercise is linked to a longer life<\/a>. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s more surprising is that a tiny amount of activity could have a noticeable effect, according to a study published Tuesday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that included more than 13,000 women with an average age of 72. For these women, walking just 4,000 steps one day a week was enough to start seeing a decline in likelihood of dying or developing heart disease over the course of the study. The findings suggest that walking a mile or two once a week is still beneficial, even if your other days are less active.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Small steps, big change<\/p>\n

Fitness apps and wearable trackers often set a goal for users to reach 10,000 steps per day. Yet many experts agree that number is arbitrary. Amanda Paluch, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst who studies step counts as a measure of physical exercise, says the popular benchmark seems to have been inspired by a Japanese pedometer device made decades ago. \u201cIt has not been backed up by scientific evidence,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Still, steps are a handy way to think about physical activity, so researchers have been working to understand exactly how many per day are linked to improved health.<\/p>\n

Read More: What Experts Think About the Japanese Walking Trend<\/a><\/p>\n

In the new study, participants wore step counters for a week, and the researchers recorded the number of days each woman achieved step counts greater than 4,000, 5,000, 6,000, and 7,000. Then, for more than a decade, they tracked whether the women developed cardiovascular disease or died. <\/p>\n

The goal was to determine whether even relatively small numbers of steps, logged on just a handful of days, would affect the women\u2019s health, says study author Dr. Rikuta Hamaya, an instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital.<\/p>\n

Women who walked 4,000 steps once or twice a week experienced a 27% lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease and a 26% lower risk of dying during the study period, compared to those who didn’t\u2014a substantial difference.<\/p>\n

Shifting from an all-or-nothing mindset<\/p>\n

The new study suggests \u201cit\u2019s not all or nothing\u2026even just starting with one day can be incredibly meaningful for your health,\u201d said Paluch, who was not involved in the work. The findings are similar to her own previous research<\/a> suggesting that even 6,000 steps a day are linked to lower risk of heart disease in adults aged about 60. The new research is also reminiscent of other teams\u2019 work on \u201cWeekend Warriors<\/a>,\u201d or people who pack their exercise into just a day or two a week but see better health outcomes than those who don\u2019t exercise. <\/p>\n

Dr. Shaan Khurshid, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, agrees that even a modest amount of exercise can have meaningful health benefits. \u201c[That finding] enables us to empower patients by saying\u2026even if you’re not exercising every day or walking every day, you’re still getting a benefit from that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Read More:\u00a0Backward Walking Is the Best Workout You\u2019re Not Doing<\/a><\/p>\n

Other factors might influence the link between movement and health. The researchers can\u2019t conclude, based on observing study participants, that movement definitively caused their better health outcomes. Preexisting frailty could have been at play, as well\u2014although the researchers did their best to control for this, there\u2019s always the chance that some of the people who walked very little did so because they were already not in the best of health. <\/p>\n

Plus, Hamaya points out, this study followed only older, mostly white women. More diverse studies with younger people are needed to determine the effects of step counts for other groups.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, as studies suggesting even small amounts of exercise are beneficial continue to pile up, the latest findings are an encouraging sign that, if you\u2019re considering upping your activity level, even a little bit can make a difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019ve probably heard this one a few times before: Research suggests that exercise is linked to a longer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[49,48,19373,407,84],"class_list":{"0":"post-230813","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-exercise-fitness","11":"tag-fitness","12":"tag-health"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}