Ten thousand or seven thousand steps a day: which is the best way to walk for your health?

Have we finally determined the ideal number of daily steps for living better and longer? Walking 7,000 steps per day – the equivalent of one hour – significantly reduces mortality and the occurrence of potentially serious diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and dementia, concludes an international team of researchers who have combed through the scientific literature.

For Professor Ding Ding (University of Sydney, Australia), first author of this work published Wednesday, July 23 in The Lancet Public Health , and her colleagues, this number of 7,000 daily steps could constitute "a more realistic and achievable objective" for some than the famous 10,000 steps per day. Especially since this symbolic bar, well known to the public, is not based so much on established medical bases as on a marketing concept born in Japan in the 1960s, at the time of the Tokyo Olympic Games (1964).

According to the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO), published in 2024, almost a third (31%) of adults , or 1.8 billion people, are insufficiently active, which puts them at increased risk of many health problems.

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