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Step aside, wellness myth.
That widely recommended goal of 10,000 daily steps is actually a 60-year-old marketing misconception.
We now know that far fewer daily steps — 2,300 to 7,000 — help with strengthening the heart and blood vessels, and lower risk of early death, stroke and depression.
But how many do you need to protect your brain?
New research from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston found out exactly how many daily steps are associated with better cognitive performance.
Stepping it up
Instead of relying on potentially inaccurate self-reported step counts like most previous studies, this new study used objective Fitbit data.
Researchers took data from 2009 to 2023 — 14 years — from 3,093 participants aged 18 to 93. The average age was 58.
They found that people’s step habits generally fell into three groups: The least active group averaged 5,108 daily steps, the moderately active group around 8,875, while the most active completed around 14,161.
Then, researchers put them to the test. Specifically, four tests to measure performance across attention span, delaying gratification, recognizing emotional cues and ignoring distractions.
Overall, the moderately and most active groups performed significantly better than the least active group in the tests measuring sustained attention, ignoring distractions and delayed gratification.
But the most active group didn’t outperform the moderately active group on every test. The most active scored highest on sustained attention and delayed gratification, while the moderately active group scored highest on ignoring distractions.
The study also builds on established recommendations: any exercise is better than none, but more is still better.
Every additional 1,000 steps daily at a moderate pace — about 9 minutes — improved scores across sustained attention, ignoring distractions and delayed gratification.
Blood pressure
The Fitbits participants wore also gave researchers insight into their blood pressure, which researchers believed might be lowered by physical activity, leading to better cognitive performance.
What they found was that higher systolic blood pressure (the top number in a reading that measures pressure from blood pumping out of the heart) was associated with slightly worse performance on delayed gratification and decision making.
However, it wasn’t significantly linked to other cognitive abilities. Researchers believe that overall, blood pressure can explain a small portion — about 5% — of the relationship between physical activity and decision-making scores.
Does this research actually apply to you?
Researchers acknowledge they looked at a very specific population of people: almost all had some college education and health insurance. Three in four participants were white, and more than 68% of them were women.
This raises questions about whether their research can apply to people outside these groups.
Additionally, they only measured cognitive performance once, so they don’t know if participants’ step count helped against cognitive decline. It’s also possible that people who have better cognition are also more active.
“Our findings support an association between long-term physical activity and later cognitive performance, but they do not prove that physical activity causes better cognition,” author Olaoluwa Okusaga told ScienceAlert.
You may have noticed that researchers only observed patterns in three of the four tests.
Researchers suggest that the last test, recognition of emotional cues, might involve different parts of the brain than the other tests, or that their testing wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up differences in people’s abilities.