IF GETTING 10,000 steps in every day is a struggle, don’t panic – new research suggests that even doing 7,000 steps daily can have big pay-off for your health. 

A new study published by the Lancet Health Journal has reviewed dozens of recent research papers about the link between daily steps and health to pin down the level of activity needed to reduce the risk of various diseases and conditions.

The authors found that walking 7,000 steps per day has significant health benefits.

For some conditions, such as heart disease, health benefits continued to increase at higher levels of walking beyond 7,000 steps.

However, for most conditions, the benefits of walking tended to level off after the 7,000-step mark. 

The authors highlighted that 7,000 may be a more realistic target than the ‘unofficial’ existing target of 10,000, especially for people who are currently not very active.

Walking around 7,000 steps per day is associated with reductions in the risk of several serious health outcomes when compared with the risk for someone walking only 2,000 steps a day.

This includes all-cause mortality (47% reduction), dementia (38% reduction), falls (28% reduction) and cardiovascular disease (25% reduction).

Walking 7,000 steps per day is also associated with a reduced risk of depression (22%), type 2 diabetes (14%) and cancer (6%).

The authors cautioned that the evidence for health benefits for conditions such as cancer or dementia is based on a small number of studies, and so more research would be needed to increase the level of certainty in those results.

“Although 10000 steps per day can still be a viable target for those who are more active, 7000 steps per day is associated with clinically meaningful improvements in health outcomes and might be a more realistic and achievable target for some,” the research paper said.

Its key findings were: “First, even modest daily step counts were associated with health benefits. Second, 7,000 steps per day was associated with sizeable risk reductions across most outcomes, compared with the reference of 2000 steps per day. Third, even though risk continued to decrease beyond 7,000 steps per day, it plateaued for some outcomes.”