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Yes, it really takes a lot of steps to stay in shape.
dreamtime.com
Walking 10,000 steps a day, like drinking 8 glasses of water a day, is one of the good things we all mysteriously decided to do. I read that it comes from a Japanese marketing campaign in the 1960s.
I’d like to report that fewer steps are required for maximum benefit, but since then there has been a fair amount of research done on the subject, showing that walking 10,000 steps a day is good for your health. understood.
Evan Britten, a cardiologist and associate professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee, co-authored a study published in the journal Nature Medicine in October 2022 that found that people using Fitbit fitness trackers were actually more active in a median of four years. We measured how much exercise we did.
This study examined the association between step count and disease. “We looked at all the human diseases that the unbiased analysis revealed,” says Britten. “We took a hard shot at six: obesity, hypertension, diabetes, esophageal reflux, sleep apnea, and depression.”
The study found that people who walked close to 10,000 steps a day had the greatest protection against most diseases. For example, the study found that increasing his steps from 6,000 to 10,000 reduced the incidence of diabetes by 56%.
Why Walking and Other Exercises—so good for us? There are several reasons, says Chad Raymond, a cardiologist and director of cardiac rehabilitation at the Harrington Cardiovascular Institute in Ohio University Hospital. First of all, the same endorphins that make you feel good after exercise open your blood vessels and help create new ones.
“Regular exercise lowers blood pressure by five to eight points, which is often what most blood pressure medications do,” he says.
Exercise also improves the ability of skeletal muscles to extract oxygen from the blood, adds Raymond. It also improves lung function and helps the heart.
Quit the press: Being a couch potato isn’t good for you. So put on your comfy shoes and go for a walk.
Write to Neal Templin at Neal.templin@barrons.com.
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