Relax – we can step down our daily exercise!

An article was published a few days ago that the mainstream media picked up. This is the BBC News website’s conclusion: Fitness: Fewer than 5,000 steps a day enough to boost health – study – BBC News

An attractive headline for sure! 8-10,000 steps was previously the “magic number” Brilliant, stop walking so far as 5,000 steps is good for us. Credit due to the BBC et al in finding a good news story.

However…

One of my favourite BBC radio series is BBC Radio 4 – More or Less. The series examines the statistics behind the headlines. When the government announces we have x number of new nurses etc they will ask questions like “Compared to when?”.

Digging deeper…

This latest study is from the Medical University of Lodz in Poland and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US. The researchers looked at 226,000 individuals – an impressive amount of data to collate and analyse. They concluded that walking an increasing amount did, up to the level studied reduce of an early death. The effects could be seen from 4,000 steps upwards – et Volia a headline is born! Wait up though…….it went on to say for every additional 1,000 steps/day (up to a maximum of 20,000) the incidence of an early death reduced by 15%.

Misleading use of a great study?

What I find slightly concerning about the way the study was reported in the mainstream media was that what the study added to our knowledge was that you can, with a big enough dataset, show that as little as 4,000 steps/day can increase your life expectancy. However the bigger the dataset the easier it is to show small improvements, so our big take home message from OxMed Private General Practice is please do get out there doing some exercise and remember, if you are capable of doing so, you really ought to still try to exceed 4,000 steps a day. If you need any more encouragement then the average person burns 30-40 calories walking 1,000 steps, so if you go for 10,000 rather than 5,000 that’s also 150-200 calories walked off. (If you want a more interesting way of thinking what 200 calories of food looks like then try this creative article from the Guardian)

If you do have mobility issues or a health condition that is putting you off taking some exercise please do get in touch with us and we will happy to help you get a bit more active.