Monitoring daily step counts can be an easy way of gauging how active you have been
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We are often told to aim for 10,000 steps a day to maintain good health, but it turns out that taking just 7000 steps every 24 hours can significantly reduce the risk of conditions such as heart disease, dementia and depression.
The 10,000 steps target is thought to have originated from a marketing campaign promoting pedometers in Japan. However, research suggests that it does have some merit.
Official advice around exercise doesn’t typically include step counts. In the UK, for instance, at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, is recommended for most adults.
“When you ask regular people on the street, they won’t be able to answer [whether they achieve] that, because how are you supposed to read ‘moderate to vigorous’?” says Melody Ding at the University of Sydney in Australia.
Step counts, which can be measured by wrist-worn pedometers or smartphones, can be a useful way to track activity, so Ding and her colleagues wanted to better understand what number is needed to maintain good health.
The team reviewed 57 studies, published between 2014 and 2025. These covered hundreds of thousands of adults, most of whom hadn’t been diagnosed with a serious health condition at the start of those studies.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more active people were, the better their health outcomes, with 10,000 steps being superior to 7000. But the latter still had serious benefits. The researchers found that the people who walked around 7000 steps a day had a 47 per cent lower risk of dying from any cause over the studies’ follow-up periods, on average, compared with taking just 2000 steps a day. They also had a 25 per cent lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease and a 47 per cent lower risk of dying from it.
That step count also seems to reduce the risk of death from cancer by 37 per cent, the risk of developing dementia by 38 per cent and the risk of getting depressive symptoms by 22 per cent.
“It’s really important to not discourage people from taking 10,000 steps, because it’s not that after 7000 steps it becomes harmful,” says Ding. But 7000 steps is “a lot more accessible and approachable” for a lot of people, she says.
“A wider number of people might see 7000 steps as far more achievable than 10,000, which is the typical threshold on fitness trackers,” says Laura Fleming at Teesside University in the UK.
But Ding also says that if the 7000 target is still too challenging, people should try to move as much as they can. For instance, the team found that taking 4000 steps a day reduced the risk of dying during a study’s follow-up period by 36 per cent, compared with just 2000 steps.
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