In many places you can read that the recommended number of steps is 10,000 per day. This is somewhat true, but not entirely. It is said that a mythical 10,000 were reached after long research by a group of Japanese scientists in the distant 1965, but the truth is that all this was part of a well-planned advertising campaign.
For decades, different world health institutions have expressed very different opinions on the issue and directly write off these 10,000 steps as a myth. Instead, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends about 90 minutes of walking a day. Which in turn equals 7-8,000 steps.
Catherine Tudor-Loki of the University of Massachusetts provides some of the clearest and most accurate guidelines for an active lifestyle and combining it with walking. According to her research, less than 5,000 steps a day show an extremely sedentary lifestyle that almost certainly carries serious health risks. Between 5,000 and 7,499 steps a day is a kind of average allowable norm, which still cannot be classified as an active lifestyle.
Between 7,500 and 9,000 steps a day are acceptable, but according to Tudor-Loki, 10,000 steps is the threshold beyond which a person can be defined as active. The expert’s recommendation is to walk 12,000 or more steps, as this way you will fall into the category of “very active”, you will be able to burn enough calories and recharge with enough tone to maintain a good figure even without extra sports.
To measure your steps accurately, install one of the many health or sports applications on your phone. Many of them manage to measure not only the steps and the distance traveled, but also the intensity of walking, the difficulty of the terrain, thus calculating the calories burned.