More than half a century ago, in 1965, the Japanese doctor Yoshiro Hatano calculated that, to enjoy iron health, you had to walk 10,000 steps a day, between seven and eight kilometers depending on the length of your stride. The Japanese doctor pointed out that, in addition to preventing cardiovascular ailments, 20% of the calories we ingested daily were burned in this way . A recommendation that even the World Health Organization, the American Center for Disease Control (CDC) or the American Heart Foundation endorsed and that includes many current apps and electronic physical activity meters as a default target.
Twenty years before Hatano, a famous British study for the first time drew attention to the need to move, to dedicate at least part of the day to walking: researchers at the time discovered that London bus collectors , who had to move through the aisles, suffered fewer heart ailments than the drivers , permanently “tied” to their seats. From there we went to the aforementioned 10,000 steps paradigm and to the current fashion of power walking , which defends the virtues of walking at a good pace as an alternative to running . According to its followers, practicing it improves the musculoskeletal system, delays the onset of osteoarthritis, facilitates digestion and even reduces the risk of colon cancer.
But is 10,000 enough? Is this round number well founded? Well, a rigorous scientific study, one of the first that has been carried out to confirm or banish the myth, has just corrected them upwards: in reality, you have to reach … 15,000 !
Healthier postmen
Scottish postmen, who still often deliver mail on foot, have helped to establish the new scale. William Tigbe, a physician at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), set his sights on them and discovered that the healthiest among them took walks of more than three hours a day, which meant about 15,000 steps and a little over seven miles . These mail carriers had normal body mass indexes, a healthy waist-to-hip ratio, and a generally exemplary metabolism, cholesterol and glucose levels included.
In contrast, co-workers who sat doing office jobs were an easier target for heart disease . A sedentary lifestyle predisposed them to suffer from the metabolic syndrome, which appears when obesity, cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension problems are combined and which triples the risk of cardiovascular disease. The researchers even put concrete figures on the predisposition to suffer heart ailments: it increased two tenths every hour of more than they remained seated if they exceeded the threshold of five.
To those who intimidate that goal of 15,000 steps, Tigbe gives some recommendations. One option is to “do your homework” in one go: at a fast pace of about four miles per hour, the challenge is overcome in just two hours . The other alternative is to do it in parts: half an hour before going to work, short breaks of ten minutes without being still, another walk to return home, and so on.
