Is walking 10k Steps per Day a good way to meet the minimum cardio guidelines?

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hello doctors! You often talk about the exercise guidelines for Americans. I have incorporated two days of HIIT (30 min each) and 1 hour of walking briskly on a treadmill in order to meet the guidelines. However, I’ve grown anxious about this subject, since I also happen to walk a lot from my house to school and back (about an hour walk each day) and it is a “brisk walk”. My main goal is to increase my powerlifting total, I’m not really interested at all in endurance sports, so I would like to do the minimum to maintain a healthy lifestyle without causing an interference with the weights.

Besides the American guidelines, in the WHO guidelines, it is mentioned that 10k steps on a daily basis would equate to an active lifestyle and is a good goal to follow. Do you agree with this recommendation?

In an attempt to know more or less how much activity I am doing on a weekly and daily basis, would it be reasonable to go for 10k steps per day as my ONLY aerobic goal?

I am sure that at least 30 minutes per day of those steps would be a brisk walk, however I am anxious about the “interference effect”. Any answer is greatly appreciated, thank you for your outstanding work and helping people lead healthier lives.

2

Schroedergustav,

Thanks for the post. So…a few assumptions here:

  1. The average person walks about 1000 steps in 10 min. 10,000 steps would be ~ 100 min of activity per day, or 700 min per week.
  2. The average intensity of a walk is ~2.5 METS for a leisurely pace or 5 METS for a brisk pace. If we are somewhere in the middle, say 3.5- this is 350 MET-Minutes per day or 2450 MET-Minutes per week.

The recommendation for activity is ~ 500-1000 MET-Minutes per week minimum, so 10,000 steps a day would likely get someone past that. I don’t think there’s likely to be much of an interference effect unless someone is very undertrained, though I’d also argue that maximum strength performance should not be the priority for individuals outside of barbell sports.

5 Likes
3

I would recommend a higher activity level for nearly all humans. The recommendation is the minimum and I would love for people to exceed them.

2 Likes
4

Got it, thanks so much!