Walking 8,000 steps on the weekend may reduce the risk of death

Tokyo: For those who do not take out time for daily morning walk or exercise due to excessive busyness, there is good news from a Japanese researchers that just walking 8,000 steps on two days on the weekend can reduce the risk of premature death. The risk can be reduced. A group of researchers from several institutions, including Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Medicine, reported that people who walked at least 8,000 steps a day, one or two days per week, had the same reduction in risk of death after 10 years as That was in people running three to seven days per week.

The study was published recently in the JAMA Network Open Medical Journal of the American Medical Association. Previous research had shown that walking 8,000 steps or more per day could reduce the risk of death. It was not clear, however, how the risk might differ based on the number of days spent walking that many steps. The researchers used data from a US National Health Survey conducted between 2005 and 2006 to study the association between daily steps taken by 3,101 people aged 20 or older and their risk of death 10 years later.

According to the study, those who walked at least 8,000 steps per day for one or two days and three to seven days had a 16.5 percent lower mortality rate in the three- to seven-day group, compared to those who walked for one or two days. The death rate was low at 14.9 percent. When the research group limited the study to deaths from diseases related to the heart and blood vessels, the rate was 8.4 percent lower for the three- to seven-day group and 8.1 percent lower for the one- or two-day group. “Now there is no need to feel pressured to go for a walk every day,” said Kosuke Inoue, assistant professor at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, who recommends weekend walks.