Challenging the popular "10,000 steps a day" guideline, here's what researchers say you should aim for rather than a high step count.
It’s no secret that a high step count can overhaul your health, but researchers no longer believe that the total number of steps taken is the only metric to influence wellbeing. New research also just found that step accumulation patterns—whether you get all of those steps at once or spread throughout the day—can greatly influence your risk of “heart attacks, stroke, and death.”
The October 2025 study, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, was led by an international team from the University of Sydney in Australia and the Universidad Europea in Spain. The study tracked 33,560 adults aged 40 to 79 who were generally inactive and had no history of heart disease or cancer. Participants wore wristbands for a week to monitor both step counts and patterns. Over roughly eight years of follow-up, clear differences emerged: those who walked continuously for 10 to 15 minutes daily faced only a 4% risk of experiencing a major cardiovascular event, compared with 13% among people whose longest daily walk was about five minutes.
Benefits were most striking for participants taking 5,000 steps or fewer. In this group, sustained walkers cut their risk of cardiovascular disease from 15% to 7%, and their risk of death dropped from about 5% to under 1%.
Researchers also found that adults who typically logged fewer than 8,000 daily steps saw significantly better heart-health outcomes when they concentrated their activity into 10- to 15-minute bouts. Even when people accumulated the same number of steps overall, those who walked in longer, continuous sessions had markedly lower rates of heart attacks, strokes, and early death compared with those whose movement came in brief, under-five-minute increments.
The results suggest that taking just one or two uninterrupted walks each day could substantially cut your risk of cardiovascular disease—far more than scattering short strolls throughout the day. Walking duration may also matter as much as—if not more than—total step count, lowering cardiovascular disease risk by up to two-thirds, or more than 60%.
Matthew Ahmadi, PhD, co-lead author and deputy director of the Mackenzie Wearables Research Hub, emphasized via news release that the findings challenge the belief that hitting 10,000 steps per day is necessary for better health. For the least active individuals, he explained, simply replacing scattered short walks with one or two steady, comfortably-paced sessions can deliver meaningful cardiovascular benefits.
Added study co-lead author and sports science researcher Borja del Pozo, PhD: “Our research shows that simple changes can make all the difference to your health. If you walk a little, set aside some time to walk more often and in longer sessions. Such small changes can have a big impact.”
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