There are plenty of good reasons to get your daily step count up:

Improved blood glucose control and glucose tolerance^[1]
Reduced insulin levels^[2]
Reduced postprandial triglyceride levels
Reduced systolic blood pressure^[3]
Enhanced cognition ^[4]
Improved mood^[5]
Enhanced fat loss, when combined with a hypocaloric diet

Health benefits of walking

To add further fuel to the motivational fire, increasing daily steps can significantly reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and type 2 diabetes (T2D), which are two of the most prevalent and deadly diseases worldwide.

Specifically, each 500–1,000-step increment in daily step count was associated with a 5–21% lower risk of CVD.^[6]^[7] Also, an increase of 2,000 steps per day from any baseline amount was associated with a 25% lower risk of developing dysglycemia (i.e., elevated fasting glucose level or elevated two-hour postprandial glucose level) in healthy people, and each 2,000-step increment in daily step count was associated with a 5% lower risk of developing T2D in people with impaired glucose tolerance.^[8]^[9]

However, the biggest and best reason for getting up and moving around more has to do with mortality. The present study was notable because it quantitatively synthesized the available evidence on daily step count and all-cause mortality, which had only been done by one other study, published in December 2021.^[7]

It reported that each 1,000-step increment in daily step count was associated with a 13% lower risk of all-cause mortality. Moreover, compared to the lowest category of daily step count, the highest category was associated with a 69% lower risk of all-cause mortality. Similar inverse associations have also been reported in previous systematic reviews.^[10]^[6]

Interestingly, accelerometer-measured step intensity, which is often measured as peak 30-minute or 1-minute cadence during the day, is not associated with all-cause mortality after adjustment for daily step count.^[11]^[12]^[13] This is interesting because total steps per day are highly correlated with step intensity.

These findings suggest that daily step count is more important than step intensity for health promotion, but due to a limited number of available studies, further research is needed to strengthen confidence in this association. At any rate, start stepping!

Step it up: Can you walk your way to a longer life? Original paper