I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I have ingrained in my brain the idea that taking 10,000 steps per day is the mark of an active lifestyle—which means it’s often pretty depressing to check the step tracker on my phone after an average day of writing while seated at my desk.
At least, it was depressing until I read the conclusion of a recent research review published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. The authors found that taking just 4,000 steps per day (the equivalent of walking around two miles) is enough to significantly reduce your risk of premature death—and walking as few as 2,500 steps per day may meaningfully reduce your risk of cardiovasculardisease-specific causes of death. That’s based on their analysis of 17 previously published studies on walking and health, which cumulatively included more than 225,000 adults from multiple countries who were tracked for an average of seven years.
The findings are no reason to shorten your daily stroll; walking more is better, the researchers found. They concluded that each additional 1,000 steps per day is linked to a roughly 15% lower risk of dying early from any cause, and they did not find evidence of a point at which additional activity stops being beneficial. So if you were already
