Should I walk 10000 steps a day?

**Amber Minogue** (0:05)
Should I walk 10,000 steps a day?
Thanks for asking. Most of us are familiar with the idea that you need to take 10,000 steps per day to stay healthy, but getting to this magic number is not that easy. Where did we get the number 10,000 from? The 10,000 step target first became popular in Japan in the 1960s. A clock maker, capitalising on people's new interest in fitness following the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, made a pedometer with a name that, when written in Japanese characters, resembled a walking man, and coincidentally translated as 10,000 steps meter. Does that mean we do not need to take 10,000 steps? Well, it's more complicated than that. A study of over 78,000 people in the UK between 2013 and 2015 using wearable trackers was published in the journals JAMA International Medicine and JAMA Neurology. They found that walking 10,000 steps a day around 5 miles could lower your risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia, particularly if you walked faster. The more your blood flows through your arteries, the more they trigger the self-renewal process in your arteries, said Professor Tony Blasevich, an expert in biomechanics at Edith Cowan University for the Guardian newspaper. Theoretically, if you can get your heart rate up and get the blood flowing faster, you might repair your arteries a bit better. Extra blood flow can be really good for all parts of your body, our brains, our muscles, everything. But while they did find that a higher number of daily steps was linked to lower risk of dementia, the risk was still reduced by 25% with as few as 3,800 steps a day.
This is good news for most people, as realistically not many of us make it to 10,000 each day. A study in Belgium which challenged participants to do just that found that of the 660 men and women who took part, only about 8% reached the 10,000-step goal. However, in a follow-up study four years later, almost no one had kept it up. So how many steps should I be aiming for per day? A lot depends on your age and lifestyle. Professor Tim Olds, a behavioural epidemiology researcher at the University of South Australia, said, There is no magic number. He advises to, Start off modestly and slowly just build up gradually bit by bit until you find what you're comfortable with. Increasing your walking, even by a few thousand steps, is important and can have significant benefits. Professor Blazowicz said most studies say people should aim for between 7,000 and 10,000 steps per day. Generally, what we find is that going from nothing to something gives us the biggest bang for our butt, he said. Say, at the moment you're only doing around 3,000 steps a day, if you go up to 5,000, that will have a relatively big effect. There you have it.
Now you know if you should take 10,000 steps per day. In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions and help you understand the true meaning behind the trends, concepts and acronyms that are making headlines. Listen along, and you really will know for sure.
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