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How many steps do you need to walk daily to stay healthy? Study suggests it's lower than 10,000

However, the study also reveals that the more you walk, the better it is for your health

Walking is one of the easiest ways to burn calories and stay active. But how many daily steps do you need to stay healthy? Many believe that 10,000 steps every day should be your goal if you wish to keep illnesses at bay. A new study suggests that your target could be a lot lower, at around 4,000 steps daily, to reduce the risk of death.

In the study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology on August 9, a team of researchers from the Medical University of Lodz in Poland and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine revealed that one needs at least 3,967 steps daily to lower the risk of dying “from every cause” and 2,337 steps every day to reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases.

However, the new analysis of 226,889 people from 17 different studies carried out around the world reveals that the more you walk, the better it is for your health. The study said that an extra 1000 steps every day reduced the risk of dying from any cause by 15%. Similarly, adding 500 daily steps were linked with a 7% reduction in dying from cardiovascular disease.

The research said that the health benefits continued to increase even if people walked for as many as 20,000 steps every day.

Jennifer Heisz, an associate professor at McMaster University, told The New York Times that he wouldn’t want people to look at 4,000 "as a magical number" that you must be above that exact step count. “It’s more so that more is better,” Heisz added.

“It’s the best medicine we can recommend: Just going out for a walk,” Dr. Randal Thomas, a preventive cardiology specialist at the Mayo Clinic told the American daily.

Maciej Banach, Professor of Cardiology at the Medical University of Lodz, Poland, and Adjunct Professor at the Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that their study confirmed the more you walk the better. "We found that this applied to both men and women, irrespective of age, and irrespective of whether you live in a temperate, sub-tropical or sub-polar region of the world, or a region with a mixture of climates," he added.

The study comes amid a rising discourse on a sedentary lifestyle and how it may contribute to an increase in cardiovascular disease and a shorter life. Insufficient physical activity affects over one-fourth of the world’s population, studies have shown. Besides that, more women (32%) than men (23%) showed a lack of participation in physical activity. Similarly, 37% of people in higher-income countries as compared to 16% in low-income countries don't undertake enough physical activity, the study added.

The World Health Organization data also paints a grim picture. It says that with 3.2 million deaths a year, insufficient physical activity is the fourth most frequent cause of death around the world.

Prof James Leiper, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, told The Guardian that the research showed just how good walking was for our health. "If you packaged the benefits as a pill, we would be hailing it as a wonder drug," he added.

Exercising or getting active can seem quite daunting if we haven’t done it for a while, he said. "What’s great about walking is that it does not require special equipment or training, and you can do it almost anywhere."

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