On average, Americans take just under 5,000 steps a day. It’s a concerning number, given that public-health researchers consider a daily step count of less than 5,000 to be sedentary, and sedentary living erodes health, leading to earlier death.
Researchers are therefore motivated to find out how best to get people moving. Do all steps count? Should they be quick steps, or are slow ones OK? Does it matter how many days of the week you take longer walks? They’ve turned to enormous databases to link people’s health with details of their steps. In a study published October 28 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, scientists found that among more than 30,000 people in the U.K. who took fewer than 8,000 steps a day, getting steps in longer walks rather than accruing them bit by bit was linked to a lower risk of death and heart disease.
For many people, daily steps are split up into myriad tiny walks to the kitchen or forays to the garage. And those short bursts of activity are certainly beneficial to some extent, says Borja del Poro Cruz, a professor at Universidad Europea de Madrid and an author of the study. “What we’ve found essentially is that any number of steps was associated with decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality,” he says.
But when people took slightly longer walks—for 10 or 15 minutes at a time—the researchers saw a larger decrease in their risk numbers than they did for people whose brief bouts of movement added up to the same number of steps.
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Past research on this topic has largely relied on either self-reported questionnaires or device-measured step counts. This study considers richer data: walk length and step count together, wrote Dr. Carl Lavie, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the Ochsner Clinical School in Louisiana, in an email to TIME. Studies like these help make the case that tweaking the way you work out—without necessarily having to exercise more—can yield benefits. While more is better, every little bit helps.
When even small numbers of steps are linked to improved health, why is it so difficult for people to get up and move? In some parts of the world, including much of the U.S., the deck is stacked against walking, says del Poro Cruz. He lives in a historic town in Spain where cars aren’t practical, and so he walks everywhere—to his kids’ school, to get groceries, to work—racking up 15,000 steps a day without really trying. It’s not so easy to build movement into the day in an environment where walking to the grocery store means a five-mile trek on the shoulder of the highway.
But some people find a way. Public-policy researcher Chris Wielga, author of the Substack How to Walk in America, has a few rules for beginners, including this one: Start from where you are. You don’t need to drive somewhere to have a walk; that divides the world into places for walking and places that are not for walking. The world is, in fact, always there, just outside the car window. You might be surprised at what you find, on the way to better health.
