Steps: Why They Are Important and How to Use Them to Live Stronger for Longer
Steps are touted as one of the major markers of daily activity and I do believe they should be.
We often hear 10,000 steps as the standard recommendation to keep us healthy, this is around 8 kilometers of walking for the average person, which can take anywhere from 1.5-2.5 hours depending on your height, cadence, and other variables. There is scientific legitimacy to this recommendation of 10,000 steps. A recent 2023 study showing that getting your daily step count to 8000-9000 steps per day has been shown to have a host of benefits and is protective against diseases like GERD (acid reflux), Obesity, Diabetes, Sleep Apnea, hypertension, and much more. It doesn’t end at 8000 steps however, this study also saw increasing your step count to 10,000, you will most likely see greater protective effects for certain diseases, like an extra 31% reduction in the chance of being diagnosed with obesity.
Steps and Mental Health
In a recent meta-analysis published in 2024 (basically a summary of a bunch of studies) with over 14,000 subjects, walking and jogging reigned comparable to cognitive behavioral therapy and SSRIs for efficacy in reducing depressive symptoms in those diagnosed with depression.
This is a bit of a crazy concept to think about, a simple walk can beat a drug? Well, yes it could. This is seen all the time with lifestyle interventions, the problem is it’s much harder to convince yourself to walk every day than to take a pill. But it also might not, depression is a very complicated mood disorder and the best treatment is going to be case-dependent and usually an amalgamation of a few different interventions.
The positive impact walking has on mental health also depends on other variables like if you’re walking outside, where you’re walking to, or if you’re walking with friends.
The effects walking has on physical and mental health do seem to be linear up to a certain point, meaning more steps will usually elicit more benefits (unless taken to the extreme), and the benefits of steps don’t stop there.
Steps and Body Composition
Steps are clearly a great option for including more low-intensity movement. You might think because your steps are low you can make up for it with more hour-long workouts or higher-intensity cardio sessions throughout the week. Although this does work in some rare cases, it’s much harder to recover from higher intensity bouts of exercise like running or sprints when compared to walking. This means over a week-long span; your overall movement could be bottle necked by the fact you are now including a ton of high-intensity workouts and not enough recovery. you might even accumulate too much fatigue from these cardio sessions to give your resistance-based exercise your undivided intensity. This is imperative when striving for body composition goals. Most want to lose fat without dropping unnecessary lean tissue, so you need to be able to perform resistance exercises with intent and intensity to keep as much muscle as you can while you’re dropping body fat if that is your goal. This is also applicable if weight or body fat loss isn’t on your agenda, performing most of your activity in a lower-intensity range will help save some room for higher-intensity resistance-based exercise so you can continue to support your strength and functionality. (Want to get into resistance-based exercise? Download my free starter guide here)
Steps and Digestion
You may have heard recently that a walk after a large meal will help improve the digestion of that meal, reduce bloating, and the post-prandial (after eating) glycemic response (or how much that meal will spike your blood sugar).
When it comes to the blood sugar response, there is evidence that those diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, who have impaired blood glucose regulation, can see acute protective benefits of becoming hyperglycemic (high-blood sugar) when a walk is taken right after a meal (source). Other studies have seen similar responses in healthy individuals.
There is also some limited research on short walks after a meal has shown positive effects on bloating. Although, I wouldn’t suggest this research to be the end-all-be-all for steps because it’s not blinded (more on this later).
Building the Habits, Not Chasing the Outcome
It’s important to remember when interpreting these studies that steps may not be the main driver for the benefit. You see, when people are more active and capable, they tend to walk more, when they aren’t mentally or physically unwell, they tend to walk more. So, saying that just increasing your step count is the solution to all your problems is most likely a distant conclusion to jump to. This is something you see in a lot of health-related research because of the difficulty controlling all the confounding variables that could be impacting the subject’s physiology. Also, you can’t blind the subjects in most cases. Blinding is a technique used in research to make sure the subjects are unaware of the intervention, but with exercise or walking, you can’t blind them from physical effort, so there is always the possibility of placebo swaying these results. This is why it’s so important to focus on building the systems in your day-to-day life that align with the vision of who you want to become and not just chasing the outcome of *insert some random number here* for your steps, because there is most likely more than just the step count at play here.
You should be aiming to get your step count to a healthy range by changing your habits, not by pacing around your living room at night because you need to cap off the last 2000 steps, trust me I’ve been there. Take a moment to envision you getting 10,000 steps per day. What are the small choices you make throughout the day that contribute to that higher step count?
This is where we get into the best thing about using steps as a marker to set and track goals within, they are integrative. Meaning that although you could spend 30 minutes on the treadmill in the morning to get steps in, you don’t have to. You can find ways to squeeze more steps out of your day that are enjoyable. You’ll find tips on this later in this article.
Our Starting Point
But first, what’s our starting point? The average American walks less than half of what we just recommended, averaging 3000-5000 steps/day. This places most below the 5000-step count, which is generally considered as the cutoff indicator for a “sedentary lifestyle”. If this is you, don’t worry! There are lots of factors that contribute to whether we are sedentary or not, and just because your steps are low doesn’t mean you aren’t active in other ways, but there is always some room to improve here.
This was me for a long time, I was performing resistance-based exercise almost daily, but for years my step count averaged around 6000, a bit better than the average for the population – but still not up to par with what is recommended.
Today, I had 26,000 steps. This week: 21,000. This month: 22,000. This year: 20,000.
Now this isn’t to brag, or to entice any praise as a step-count elitist, but to show it is possible to get there. Of course, this is a bit more steps than I’d like to accumulate, with my job adding an additional 5000 per day, which is a blessing many others don’t have. So, I would say realistically my steps are around 15,000/day if you don’t count work (to give some hope to those who work sedentary jobs).
Now let’s talk about how I (and hopefully you) can begin to do this:
Tracking and Increasing Steps
If you want to change something, you need to know where you’re starting from and have a vision of where you want to get to. This doesn’t have to be numbers. For me, this was making a promise to walk to work every day and spending at least 15 minutes after every workout doing a walking cooldown. Now if only it was that easy, you could just make a promise to yourself and then you were off to the races. Sadly, the human brain is designed to be lazy and conserve energy for harsh winters and fasts that don’t occur in the modern day, not very convenient for those of us with health and fitness goals. So, tracking can be helpful to keep you accountable and see if the habits are working. Any smart phone these days can give you a rough estimate, but finding a tracker you will wear and use consistently that looks good is key. Countless times I have seen people with dedicated step trackers that don’t look good, and they never wear them. They must integrate with your life in other ways.
Now let’s say you check your baseline and it’s 2000. This doesn’t mean you should jump from 2000 per day to 15,000 off the bat, the habits you’d need to achieve that are going to be recruited way too fast to be sustainable, but slow increases of 2-3000 steps per day (on average) to start is usually the best way to begin (PMID: 21798015). The rate at which you increase the number is less important, and this should vary depending on your age and other factors. You can always start by including walking blocks throughout your workday or finding ways to sneak an extra walk in.
My Tips on Increasing Steps
1. Walk to work, or walk during work
Walk to your place of work, if it’s too far, set 1-hour alarms on your phone to remind you to get up and walk for 5-10minutes throughout your workday.
If you drive to work, park a couple blocks away or get off the bus a stop or two early and walk the rest of the way.
If you work from home, spend a day or two working at a local cafe or library, and walk there.
2. Create walking accountability and enjoyment
Invite friends to go on a walk, ask your neighbors or friends if they have a dog you could walk in the morning, having that obligation is going to keep you accountable.
Pick up an audiobook or podcast that you can listen to while you walk. This will give you something to look forward to if you really don’t like the idea of walking.
3. Make up steps
If you average 8000 over the weekdays because of a busy schedule, try to plan some extra walking on the weekends. This isn’t the most “balanced” way to increase your step count, but averaging out the step count over the week is better than not and sometimes life doesn’t suit what’s most optimal. Plan a hike with family or friends, play soccer with your kids for an hour, walk to the grocery store, or walk through a local park. In our example, you would have to aim for 15,000 on Saturday and Sunday to balance out your week at 10,000.
I hope this read gives you some perspective, motivation, and helpful tips to start increasing your step count in a habitual and sustainable way. Consider subscribing below to learn more about how to live longer and stronger