Walk to Improve Your Health
The easiest thing you can do to drastically improve your health is...
Walking.
It doesn't take any equipment.
You can start small.
It can be 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 90 minutes, or anything in between.
And it will massively improve your health.
How can a little thing like walking make such a big difference?
Let’s dive into the data.
A meta-analysis of 15 studies was done looking at the effect of daily step count on all-cause mortality(a fancy way to say dying from anything).
Here's what the researchers did.
1st they put all the data into a big pool looking at the 47,717 people in the studies.
2nd they separated the 47,717 people into 4 groups.
Group A - Averaged 3553 steps per day.
Group B - Averaged 5801 steps per day
Group C - Averaged 7842 steps per day
Group D - Averaged 10901 steps per day.
3rd they looked at these 4 groups and who lived versus died and compared it to the steps taken per day. (They did a lot more complicated data analytics than this, but I’m not going to try explaining “Wilcoxon rank-sum test” or “ inverse-variance weight random-effects models”.)
Here’s What They Found
When looking at this data they found a clear inverse relationship between the number of steps taken per day and the risk of all-cause mortality.
In other words, the more steps people took, the lower their risk of dying from any cause.
Compared to Group A (the lowest step count):
Group B had a 40% lower risk of death
Group C had a 53% lower risk of death
Group D had a 66% lower risk of death
These findings held true even after accounting for factors like age, sex, and health status. The researchers also found that the benefits of walking were consistent across different age groups, though the effect was slightly stronger in older adults.
This study adds to the research that those that walk more each day have a lower risk of dying.
Moving from Group A to Group B - an increase of about 2,250 steps per day(about a 15 minute walk) - was associated with a 40% reduction in mortality risk.
So if you're looking to improve your health - start walking today.
Start small. Stay consistent. Eventually work up to 9000 steps a day.
References
Paluch, A. E., Bajpai, S., Bassett, D. R., Carnethon, M. R., Ekelund, U., Evenson, K. R., ... (2022). Daily steps and all-cause mortality: a meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts. The Lancet Public Health, 7(3), e219-e228.