More Steps Or A Faster Pace? The Better Option May Surprise You

There are days when 10,000 steps happen without much effort. You walk to grab coffee, run a few errands, take an afternoon walk, and suddenly you're there. Then there are days when you look down at your phone at 6 p.m. and realize you've barely cracked 3,000.

If you've ever tried to squeeze in an extra walk purely to get that number up, new research1 may take some of the pressure off. Because the health benefits of walking may not come down to step count alone. How quickly you move appears to matter, too.

And depending on your schedule, that could give you another way to make your daily walks count.

Tracking steps & walking pace

For the study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researchers analyzed activity data from ~100,000 middle-aged adults enrolled in the UK Biobank.

Participants wore wrist-based activity trackers for seven consecutive days, giving researchers an objective look at both how many steps they accumulated and how quickly they moved. They divided daily step counts into four groups: fewer than 5,000, 5,000 to 7,500, 7,500 to 10,000, and more than 10,000.

To capture walking intensity, the researchers also calculated each person's "peak 30-minute cadence." Essentially, they identified the average number of steps per minute during a person's most active 30 minutes of the day. Those minutes didn't have to happen all at once.

Researchers then followed participants for roughly eight years, tracking deaths from any cause as well as deaths from cardiovascular disease.

Fewer, faster steps may offer similar longevity benefits

Getting more steps still mattered. People accumulating 7,500 to 10,000 steps per day had the lowest risk of early death overall, regardless of how quickly they walked.

But the study also found an interesting trade-off between volume and intensity.

Among people taking fewer than 5,000 steps per day, reaching a pace of around 80 steps per minute was associated with a 28% lower risk of death compared with the study's least-active reference group. That risk was similar to what researchers saw among people taking 5,000 to 7,500 steps per day at a slower pace of around 60 steps per minute.

Put simply, taking fewer steps at a quicker pace appeared to offer benefits comparable to taking more steps at a slower pace.

And there was another useful finding. They found that maintaining a brisker pace for at least 30 minutes per day was associated with a lower risk of death even when researchers accounted for total step count. Similar patterns showed up for cardiovascular mortality.

The takeaway

The findings give us a more flexible way to think about daily movement. If you're already walking 7,500 to 10,000 steps a day, you don't necessarily need to turn every walk into a power walk. That range was associated with the lowest mortality risk regardless of pace.

But if your job keeps you at a desk, your schedule makes long walks difficult, or getting thousands of additional steps simply isn't realistic, adding some speed may be another way to make the movement you're already getting more meaningful.