Fewer steps, taken faster: a 103,684-person study says pace counts too

Last July the largest review of step counts put the point of diminishing returns around 7,000 a day. A study published today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine adds the other variable. Researchers followed 103,684 UK Biobank adults who wore wrist trackers for a week, with about eight years of follow-up and 1,697 deaths, and looked at daily steps together with the pace of a person's thirty most active minutes. People taking fewer than 5,000 steps a day at a brisk pace — 80 or more steps a minute — had a risk reduction comparable to people taking 5,000–7,500 at a slow one. Among everyone under 7,500 steps, a faster pace was linked to progressively lower mortality. From 7,500 to 10,000 steps, risk was lowest regardless of pace. Publicly funded, observational, and the press release says plainly that it cannot establish cause and effect.

How to read it without a new number. The thirty-minute cadence figure is a statistic, not a prescription; the researchers caution that it should not be read as thirty continuous minutes at that pace. What the study adds to last year's curve is that intensity can substitute for volume at the low end — a short brisk walk does some of the work of a long slow one — and that at the high end, volume alone is enough. For someone at 3,000 steps who cannot imagine 7,000, that is useful: walk the 3,000 faster. For someone at 8,000, it says stop reading step studies.

Loree’s take

This is the study for my patients who say they do not have time. Ten brisk minutes — the pace at which you can talk but not sing — on the way to the car and back is a different exposure from the same minutes strolling, and the data now say so at the population level. I still would not give anyone a cadence target. I would ask them to walk like they are slightly late, once a day.

Ben’s take

The ring already shows your steps. It will now show your cadence, and someone will sell a cadence program. The paper does not need either: it is a seven-day wrist measurement in a cohort, and its lesson fits in a sentence. The industry turns sentences into dashboards because dashboards renew. The sentence does not.