Recipe of the Week

Fun, Facts & Fitness from Mary Morris MSc.

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The recent controversy surrounding how many steps we should be doing every day does not surprise me one little bit. For many it has become a bit of an obsession with constant checking to see how many steps they have done or, for an even larger group of people, it has been dismissed as being too impossible to achieve, sending them back to the comfort of their sedentary lifestyles. It has almost become like a big black 'step' cloud hanging over the majority of the population!

The number 10,000 originated from a marketing campaign in Japan, linked to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics by the Company Yamasa Tokei Keiki and called manpo-kei , which translates as the 10,000 step meter and quite simply that figure has stuck. I must say that the number does have a certain 'ring' to it and there is no doubt that for some it has worked in encouraging them to be more active. But at that time there had been no research linked to how many steps will improve our overall health and it is only in recent years that its true worth as a target has been tested.

I acknowledge that 10,000 steps is a difficult target to achieve, even for those of us who are pretty active and almost impossible for those in sedentary full-time jobs, or for that big chunk of the population who simply don't like to move much. So, let's look at the latest research and unravel the whole issue, so we can start to take a realistic approach to it.
 

How many is enough?

In short, we can reap excellent health benefits with a far lower step count than 10,000 but it is true to say the more you do the better.

A study in 2019 found that the mortality rate of older women (with an average age of 72) decreased as their step count increased. This showed that, long before reaching 10,000 steps a day, they were seeing health benefits. 

They discovered that those taking 4,400 steps a day had a 41% lower risk of dying than those taking 2,700 or fewer.

Interestingly, the study found that the health benefits of doing 10,000 steps a day were no greater than doing 7,500! I have known this for a long time now and told all those I train with that 7,500 steps a day should be their aim if they want to maximise their chances of living a long and healthy life as it is much more achievable.
 

European Journal of Preventative Cardiology

Another study, recently published in the European Journal of Preventative Cardiology, involved more than 200,000 people. (Of course, the more people participating in any study, the more robust the results.) Interestingly, the study suggested that walking even as few as 2,337 steps a day was enough to reduce the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, but for every extra 1,000 steps a day, the benefits kept on increasing.
 

Our Daily 30-Minute Walk

We may be covering around 1½ miles in our half-hour walk and that, on average, equates to about 3,000 steps. This gives us a good chunk of our required 7,500 steps a day. Then, if we get up out of our chair at regular intervals during the day, we can almost certainly reach our goal. Of course, some days are naturally more active than others so aiming for a weekly total of 52.500 steps would be perfect. All that moving around more is called our ADLs (Activities of Daily Life) and here are a few suggestions to up that number:

• Drive our car short of our destination and walk to where we need to be.
• Never leave things at the bottom of the stairs, take them up each time.
• Get up and move around whenever the adverts are on the television.
• Always take the stairs rather than a lift whenever the opportunity arises.
• Dance around the kitchen to a great piece of music on the radio – my favourite is Barry White, You're My Everything!

100 Steps per Minute

Try adding some 'pace' to your walks then it’s not so much about the number of steps you take but how hard you are working when doing them! That's when the BIG health benefits come – pushing the cardiovascular system to transport more blood to the working muscles, improving your heart and lung fitness. If you use the stopwatch on your phone and walk at your normal pace, you can count how many steps you do in exactly one minute. I found I did 100 in 55 seconds showing that my normal pace is effective. If you find you are really quite slow then a good way to 'up the pace' is to gradually increase your steps per minute. Try walking a little faster from one lamppost to another and then slower to the next one. You will be amazed at how you gradually become accustomed to walking faster.

I started a ‘steady’ walking group recently as I realised that my regular walking group had become ‘super-walkers’, going at too fast a pace for many of my other members and therefore they were being unwittingly excluded. My 'steady group' is now increasing their pace and getting faster. I know, because we are covering our regular walking routes a lot quicker than when we started a few months ago.  It works – it really, really works!

Did you know... 

While 100 steps per minute may sound fast, it's a long way behind the speed of the amazing tap dancer Roy Castle. In 1973 he earned a place in the Guinness World Records for tap dancing the greatest number of steps in one minute - an astonishing 1,440 steps!

He also achieved a separate record when in 1985, at the Guinness World of Records exhibition, in Piccadilly, London, he danced one million taps in 23 hours 44 minutes, raising £1 million for charity.

Roy Castle OBE (31 August 1932 – 2 September 1994) was well-known as a singer, comedian, actor, tv presenter and musician. He appeared in Carry-on films, as a guest star on Morecambe and Wise, acted with Ronnie Barker and Jimmy Edwards, and once stood in for Bruce Forsyth hosting an episode of The Generation Game. From 1972 - 1994 he hosted Record Breakers, a children's show on BBC1 during which time he broke 9 records himself.

He died of lung cancer which, as a non-smoker, he attributed to passive smoking from playing the trumpet in smoky jazz clubs, and towards the end of his life he set up the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation. His widow Fiona worked with the charity after his death and campaigned for the British smoking ban, which came into effect in Northern Ireland in 2004, Scotland in 2006, and England and Wales in 2007, banning smoking in virtually all enclosed public places.