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Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds

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Re: Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds

#21

Post by comfypotato »

farseer wrote: post #6
anonporridge wrote: post #2

Doctors: It's really important that you regularly exercise. Get your heart rate up high a few times a week with some sports! Doctors: Just 10,000 steps of walking every day is fine too! Doctors: Ok, how about 8,000 steps only once or twice a week. Can you do that? Doctors: For the love of god, please just get off the couch every once in a while...

You joke but perhaps we need to (scientifically) find the minimum number of steps for a reasonable lifespan in tabular form for a given weight, lifestyle, diet, occupation and ethnicity. The law of diminishing returns will apply after a certain amount of physical activity. So will negative consequences of too much exercise where you damage your limbs.

There’s not much science for the ultramarathon folks, but in general more is better. This talk of negative consequences of too much exercise has no grounding in reality.

Re: Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds

#22

Post by mejutoco »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #15
anonporridge wrote: post #2

Doctors: It's really important that you regularly exercise. Get your heart rate up high a few times a week with some sports! Doctors: Just 10,000 steps of walking every day is fine too! Doctors: Ok, how about 8,000 steps only once or twice a week. Can you do that? Doctors: For the love of god, please just get off the couch every once in a while...

> An average person has a stride length of approximately 2.1 to 2.5 feet. That means that it takes over 2,000 steps to walk one mile and 10,000 steps would be almost 5 miles.

For other readers, about 8km.

Re: Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds

#23

Post by comfypotato »

This isn’t new information. The standard of 3 MET exercise for 2.5-5 hours a week (16k steps at 2.5 mph is in the middle of that range) has been around for a while. It’s in multiple country’s exercise guidelines, which is about as formal as you can get.

Comprehensive literature review has established that 2.5 hours a week at 3 MET reduces your risk of death by cardiovascular event by 70%, and there’s plenty of evidence for other benefits. The more you spread out the exercise the better.

Re: Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds

#25

Post by rayrey »

BigCryo wrote: post #4

Ain't going to help ...you're going to die anyway.. so best you just move to Brazil and travel to the Amazon River and build a raft and live on it and catch fish and pick fruit and stare up at the stars every night till you get old and decrepit and wonder at the marvelous universe that you were born in until one day you see no more and you feel no more and you are no more.. instead of just striving and working out an…

Probably get killed by a poacher or illegal gold miner.

Re: Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds

#26

Post by inglor_cz »

Personal experience, N == 1...

For the last 400 days, I walked at least 10 000 steps daily every day - in heat, frost, snow or rain. Sometimes much more, so the total sum exceeds 5 million steps.

My immune system has improved visibly, but all that activity didn't have any measurable effect on my weight, which has fluctuated randomly around the same set point as in the years before.

I wonder whether all the putative health effect stems from the immune system improvement.

Re: Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds

#27

Post by morkalork »

cozzyd wrote: post #3

I wonder how remote work has impacted the average number of steps per day. I normally get ~5k steps from my commute (walk from home to train, walk from train to office and vice versa) without doing anything else. On days I work from home I'm definitely much more sedentary. Yes I can go on a walk to compensate, but I usually don't...

My wife is working in healthcare and I'm working from home and we go for walks during lunch before she heads out for the evening shift. Not only am I getting up and moving around, we're spending more meaningful time together. If I was commuting to an office every morning, we would hardly see each other during the week.

Re: Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds

#29

Post by pl90087 »

That's not at all what the study "finds".

It found a correlation between cardiovascular health and walking a certain amount a week. This does not at all suggest causation. I'm not nitpicking here. The most likely reason for this is that people who have a significantly more healthy life style have better cardiovascular health while also happening to move significantly more. Just getting up and walking 8k steps twice a week and otherwise having unhealthy lifestyle of the control group is possibly going to do nothing for your cardiovascular health. Claiming anything else needs much different evidence than the linked study.

Edit: I'm not saying walking is bad for you. That's just as wrong. I'm saying just walking won't do much for you. Get a more healthy lifestyle. Cardiovascular health will follow and you'll notice that 16k steps or something comparable will look small compared to what your active/healthy lifestyle will do.

Re: Walking 8k Steps Twice a Week Could Prolong Your Life, Study Finds

#30

Post by surfsvammel »

pl90087 wrote: post #29

That's not at all what the study "finds". It found a correlation between cardiovascular health and walking a certain amount a week. This does not at all suggest causation. I'm not nitpicking here. The most likely reason for this is that people who have a significantly more healthy life style have better cardiovascular health while also happening to move significantly more. Just getting up and walking 8k steps twice a…

Doesn’t everyone working with science or medicine (be that research, teaching or journalism) learn that causation≠correlation? I don’t get it.
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