Research shows walking 4,000 steps daily reduces risk of death

Simply walking 4,000 steps a day can decrease your risk of mortality from any cause, suggests a recent study, the most extensive analysis to date. But here's the exciting part: the more you walk, the greater the health benefits.

For years, it has been unclear how many steps we should strive for or if there's a cap on the rewards we can reap.

The researchers found that people who walk at least 4,000 steps a day can have better cardiovascular health even with fairly light activity.

They studied data from 17 previous studies, involving a staggering 2,26,889 individuals, and followed their journey for an average of seven years to unravel the impact of different daily step counts on health.

The results, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, unveiled that walking 3,967 steps a day already starts to reduce the risk of mortality from any cause.

Astonishingly, just 2,337 steps a day can significantly decrease the risk of dying from cardiovascular diseases.

In fact, for every additional 1,000 steps, the risk of dying from any cause plummets by 15 per cent, while a mere 500 extra steps leads to a 7 per cent drop in cardiovascular disease-related mortality.

Maciej Banach, a professor of cardiology at the Medical University of Lodz in Poland, said, "Our study confirms that 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, subtropical or subpolar region of the world, or a region with a mixture of climates."

As per the World Health Organisation (WHO), insufficient physical activity is the fourth most frequence cause of death in the world, with over 3.2 million deaths a year attributed to it.

Meanwhile, the golden range for those aged 60 and above falls between 6,000 and 10,000 steps. But wait, there's more!

The team also ventured into the realm of the super-steppers, investigating the effects of walking up to a staggering 20,000 steps a day, equivalent to trekking 9-10 miles.

To their delight, the health benefits continued to soar, without any sign of diminishing returns. However, the team does caution that the data on these "high steppers" remains limited, and further studies are needed.