The Case for Walking
Small steps yield big benefits
Some people get a little fanatical about their exercise. Take I-Min Lee. She walks routinely instead of driving, and she runs regularly. Lee wears a step counter and is “a little obsessed” with keeping track. “This makes me understand how the little things we do during the day can add up to quite a large total number of steps,” the 59-year-old says. Lee admits she has more motivation than the average person. “After all,” she says, “would you listen to a researcher who does not practice what she studies?”
Lee is an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts who focuses on how physical activity can promote health and prevent chronic disease. Her latest study is actually about steps. Specifically: How many, or how few, an older person needs to take on a daily basis to reap significant health perks.
Along with several other studies out this year, the results reveal the incredible power of simply doing what humans have done since we stopped swinging from trees. And Lee’s results seem to debunk a myth so common it’s programmed into our lives.
For decades, experts have advised us to take 10,000 steps a day for better health. The number is even coded into fitness trackers as a goal. It’s not entirely clear where it came from, though it seems to have originated in the…
