Experts Found The 'Magic Number' Of Steps We Should Take In A Day To Stay Healthy
How many steps do you walk on an average day? And does it really even matter? Well, here’s the thing, it actually does. Thanks to new research by Harvard Medical School, we now know a lot more about what might happen to your body if you don’t hit a certain distance. But the number of steps that you need to reach may be quite different from the long-recommended goal of 10,000.
The numbers game
When it comes to staying fit and healthy, we’re obsessed with numbers. There’s the now-famous “five-a-day,” for instance, which refers to the portions of fruit and vegetables you should eat on a daily basis. Then there’s the suggested eight glasses of water – or two-liter rule. And many will be familiar with other recommended restrictions, too, such as the 14 units of alcohol per week for men and seven for women.
Factoring in steps
What about the other health-related figures we can now keep track of, too? There’s the number of calories we burn, for example, and our heart rates and blood pressure scores. And we’ve also long been obsessed with how much we weigh. So it seems a natural step – if you’ll pardon the pun – to start considering how many physical steps we take per day, too. After all, devices these days make it so easy.
Keeping track
Perhaps the most simple product on the market is the humble step counter, or to give it its official name, a pedometer. The consistently impressive sales of these devices – 125 million were dispatched around the globe in 2017, for instance – seem to suggest that people just can’t get enough of tracking how far they walk.
Growing popularity
Unsurprisingly, then, pedometers are now everywhere. Popular brands include Fitbit, Garmin, Jawbone, Apple, Samsung and so many more besides. And then there’s the Japanese device called the manpo-kei, or the “10,000-steps meter” as it translates. Any guesses what it does?
