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As the June Start TODAY challenge kicks off, you may be wondering how much you need to walk in order to see health benefits. For beginners, it’s more than reasonable to start small and try to build up your walking habit, as is the goal of the June challenge. But for walkers ready to make the most of their exercise, what should your daily step count goal be, and how often do you need to hit it?
Before you spend your evening walking laps around your home, know that new research shows that you don’t necessarily have to hit your step goal every single day to improve your health. A new study found that walking 8,000 steps just once or twice per week can be enough to significantly reduce the risk of death over 10 years.
The inspiration for the study was people who only have time to walk as exercise on the weekend, study co-author Dr. Kosuke Inoue, a chronic disease epidemiologist at Kyoto University in Japan, tells TODAY.com.
“Although recent studies have shown that more daily steps were associated with a steady decline in all-cause and cardiovascular mortality risk up to approximately 8,000 daily steps, we realized that evidence is lacking about the health benefits of walking intensively only a few days a week,” he explained.
For the study, published this week in JAMA Network Open, researchers used data previously collected for the 2005 and 2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. These long-running nationally representative surveys are conducted by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The researchers included 3,101 participants for whom the surveys had accelerometer data that tracked their daily steps for one week, as well…
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