You may have heard this. Adults should aim for 10,000 daily steps. This one-size-fits-all approach provides a clear message regardless of how different people’s lifestyles and bodies are.
An international team of researchers has found that even the most sedentary among us can avoid the harmful effects of sitting by taking extra steps these days.
Flammable lifestyles are very common, and we Find out if they are connected Increased risk of cardiovascular (CVD) death, increased risk of cancer and diabetes, and shorter life expectancy. And Those risks They are low for those who have them Maximum number of steps And fast walkers.
But until now, it wasn’t clear whether sedentary people could offset those alarming health risks with daily activity.
The more steps people in the new study took, regardless of how sedentary they were, the lower their risk of CVD and early death. Therefore, those of us who have desk jobs will not disappear completely, although the researchers emphasized that it is still necessary to try to reduce the time of reduction in general.
“This is by no means a get out of jail for overstayers.” He says. Public health scientist Matthew Ahmadi from the University of Sydney, Australia.
“But it also contains an important public health message that all activity is important and that people can try to reduce the health consequences of unavoidable downtime by increasing their daily intake.”
Ahmadi and his colleagues analyzed data from 72,174 volunteers who contributed to the study. UK BiobankA large longitudinal data set established in 2006 will continue to track participants’ health measures for at least 30 years.
There was an average of 6.9 years worth of comprehensive health data for each participant included in the study. Participants wore wrist accelerometers for seven days to estimate their physical activity levels, such as the number of steps they took and the amount of time they spent sitting.
The average time spent sitting was 10.6 hours per day, so those who spent more than that were considered to have ‘high sitting time’, while those with fewer hours were considered ‘low sitting’.
Participants who were statistically affected by poor health in the first two years were not included in this study, so the findings are applicable only to people who are generally healthy with at least the first two years worth of data. It is unclear whether the data includes disabilities that affect step counts.
The team found that between 9,000 and 10,000 daily steps, for a more sedentary lifestyle, reduced the risk of incident CVD by 21 percent and the risk of death by 39 percent.
Regardless of the duration of the participant’s stay, The researchers found. 50 percent of the benefits come in around 4,000 to 4,500 daily steps.
“Any daily steps above the reference level of 2,200 steps was associated with lower mortality and CVD risk, for both low and high-risk periods,” Ahmadi and colleagues found. To conclude.
“Accumulating 9,000 to 10,000 steps per day significantly reduced the risk of death and CVD among participants who were highly sedentary.”
This study was published in British Journal of Sports Medicine.