You've probably heard this a few times before: Research shows that exercise associated with longer life.
What's even more surprising is that even small amounts of activity can have a noticeable effect, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal British Journal of Sports Medicine They included more than 13,000 women with an average age of 72 years. For these women, walking just 4,000 steps one day a week was enough to start seeing a decrease in the likelihood of dying or developing heart disease over the course of the study. The results show that walking a mile or two once a week is still beneficial, even if you're less active on other days.
Small steps, big changes
Fitness apps and wearable trackers often set users a goal of walking 10,000 steps per day. However, many experts agree that this number is arbitrary. Amanda Paluch, a kinesiology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies step counting as a measure of physical activity, said the popular benchmark appears to have been inspired by a Japanese pedometer created decades ago. “This is not supported by scientific evidence,” she says.
Still, counting steps is a useful way to think about physical activity, so researchers are working to understand exactly how many steps a day is associated with improved health.
Read more: What experts think about the Japanese walking trend
In the new study, participants wore step counters for a week, and the researchers recorded the number of days that each woman achieved step counts greater than 4,000, 5,000, 6,000, and 7,000. Then, over a period of more than a decade, they tracked whether the women developed cardiovascular disease or died.
The goal was to determine whether even a relatively small number of steps taken over just a few days would affect women's health, said study author Dr. Rikuta Hamaya, an instructor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Women who walked 4,000 steps once or twice a week had a 27% lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease and a 26% lower risk of death during the study period compared to those who did not—a significant difference.
Avoiding all-or-nothing thinking
The new study suggests that “it's not all or nothing… even starting with one day can be incredibly significant for your health,” said Paluch, who was not involved in the work. The findings are similar to her own previous studies suggesting that even 6,000 steps per day is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease in adults around 60 years of age. The new study also resembles the work of other teams on “Weekend Warriors” or people who only exercise one or two days a week but see better health results than those who don't exercise.
Dr. Shaan Khurshid, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, agrees that even modest amounts of exercise can provide significant health benefits. “[That finding] allows us to empower patients by saying, 'even if you don't exercise every day and walk every day, you still get benefits from it,'” he says.
Read more: Walking backwards is the best workout you don't do.
Other factors may influence the relationship between movement and health. Based on observations of study participants, the researchers cannot conclude that movement definitely improved their health. Pre-existing weakness may also have played a role – although the researchers did their best to control for this, there is always the possibility that some of the people who walked very little did so because they were already not in the best health.
Additionally, Hamaya notes, this study only included older, mostly white women. More diverse studies involving young people are needed to determine the impact of step counting on other groups.
However, as research suggesting that even small amounts of exercise is beneficial continues to accumulate, the latest findings are an encouraging sign that if you're planning to increase your activity level, even a little can make a difference.
