An exercise scientist recommends one simple way to maximize the health benefits of walking 10,000 steps a day
It’s 2025, and walking 10,000 steps a day is one of the most popular fitness goals on the planet.
The scientific rationale is dubious – studies show that 7,000-8,000 steps a day gives optimal returns for your health. But the human psyche likes to have a nice, round number to aim for, and if a step goal encourages people to move more, that’s hardly a bad thing.
However, a 2024 article published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports suggests that to maximize benefits such as weight loss, lower blood pressure and lower blood sugar levels, more than just the number of steps walked should be considered.
The article shows that both quantity and quality of exercise (i.e. intensity) are associated with five cardiovascular risk factors for metabolic syndrome: increased waist circumference, high triglycerides, low HDL (or “good” cholesterol), high blood pressure and high blood sugar.
To improve these numbers, “the analysis shows that you can get by with just more exercise, but it’s better to do more volume and more intensity of exercise in combination,” lead author Dr. Elroy Aguiar tells me . “It is the combination of quantity and quality that gives you the best benefit.”
In other words, incorporating a little more brisk walking into each day can have a significant positive impact.
How to walk 10,000 steps a day for optimal health results
The good news is that, especially for beginners, increasing your exercise quality doesn’t necessarily mean signing up for a few grueling HIIT classes or doing sprint intervals. It can be as simple as speeding up your walking a bit.
“Accumulating a high volume of walking throughout the day and then focusing on faster walking or jogging for at least 30 minutes is a way to lower your scores on each of the progressive risk factors,” says Dr. Aguiar.
However, even shorter periods of more vigorous physical activity have been shown to have a positive effect.
“One of the really interesting findings of our work was that if you looked at people’s highest minute of activity during each day, averaged over the follow-up period, it was a very strong signal that they had one or more risk factors for metabolic syndrome,” Dr. Aguiar explains. “Even that small minute of high-intensity activity can be helpful.”
In practice, applying this advice might mean taking most of your daily steps at your normal pace. You could then try incorporating a brisk walk while running errands at some point during the day – a higher cadence, or the number of steps you take per minute, is also associated with better health outcomes.
The benefits of focusing on the quality and quantity of exercise
If you ask people about their fitness goals for 2025, “improving risk factors for metabolic syndrome” is unlikely to come up too often. But if you break it down into its necessary parts, the benefits of improving the quality and quantity of exercise become much more apparent.
“We know that if you accumulate fat mass around the abdominal area, it’s more dangerous than accumulating fat mass in the lower body or subcutaneously [just under the skin]. Visceral fat around your vital organs is very damaging in terms of the metabolic signaling that goes on there. In fact, it’s dangerous to accumulate a lot of abdominal fat because it changes the way our vital organs function in that area.
“By increasing the amount and intensity of activity, you can reduce weight and belly fat.”
As always, you’re likely to see better weight loss results by changing both your activity level and your diet. But exercise alone will still provide significant benefits.
“Especially for people who are overweight and obese and may have metabolic syndrome, exercise and behavioral strategies can minimize and reverse risk factors in the early stages of disease,” Dr. Aguiar adds.
Blood pressure is another risk factor for metabolic syndrome that can be improved by increasing the quantity and quality of weekly physical activity.
“It’s already well established that exercise lowers systolic and diastolic blood pressure; this is called post-exercise hypotension,” says Dr. Aguiar. “For example, as early as 15 or 20 minutes after exercise, you may notice a decrease in blood pressure after a single walk.
“A simple walk at a brisk pace, faster than normal, will lower your blood pressure for about 24 hours after exercise.”
Dr. Aguiar adds that a brisk trot can also lower blood glucose levels for up to 48 hours.
“Each of these five risk factors for metabolic syndrome, over a short period of time of a few hours to a few days, can benefit from brisk walking, slow jogging or something similar. With consistent adherence to physical activity recommendations, all five risk factors will also improve over time.”
How to increase your activity level
Overall, Dr. Aguiar says the World Health Organization ‘s (WHO) current recommendations for physical activity provide a solid benchmark to aim for.
They state that “every step counts in improving health,” and each week adults should aim to rack up 150 minutes of moderate activity, 75 minutes of high activity, or a combination of the two. But this general prescription can take different forms to fit your lifestyle.
“Some people may choose to do most of their activity on the weekend, and some people may break their activity into shorter periods throughout the day,” says Dr. Aguiar.
“You can also use randomized movements. The new WHO report says that all movement matters, so if that means walking a little faster to your car or the train station, just to get your heart rate and metabolic rate up a little bit for short periods that you can accumulate throughout the day, those things count in terms of exercise.
“And they’re random. We all walk, to some extent: from your office to the bathroom or to the local coffee shop. If you can focus on walking a little bit faster than normal, it’s going to be good for a lot of those risk factors, especially in terms of blood glucose levels and blood pressure.”
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