Ten thousand steps. If you’ve ever glanced at your phone at the end of a long day and felt a small defeat over a number you didn’t hit, you know exactly the finish line this is about. New research is making the case that the number alone was never the whole story.
A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine this September found that walking at a brisk pace can lower your risk of early death by roughly as much as logging thousands of additional daily steps at a slower pace — meaning pace and volume can substitute for each other more than the simple step-count target ever suggested.
What the researchers actually measured
Researchers followed 103,684 UK Biobank participants, with 64,743 of them analyzed specifically for all-cause mortality. Activity was tracked between 2013 and 2015, with follow-up running through November 2022 — a genuinely long observation window, which is part of why the findings carry weight rather than reading as a one-season snapshot.
That’s a large sample for this kind of research, and the long follow-up period means the study could actually track who was still alive years later, rather than relying on a shorter window that might miss slower-developing health effects.
The finding that challenges the step-count assumption
Here’s the specific comparison that makes this study worth paying attention to: people who walked fewer than 5,000 steps a day, but at a brisk pace of 80-plus steps per minute, showed mortality benefits similar to people who walked 10,000 slower steps at around 60 steps per minute. In plain terms, walking faster for less time tracked with similar outcomes to walking slower for longer.
The lowest overall mortality risk in the study showed up in the 7,500-to-10,000-daily-steps range — so the research isn’t arguing that steps don’t matter at all, just that pace is a second, meaningfully separate lever, not an afterthought to the number on your tracker.
What the study’s lead researcher said about it
Emmanuel Stamatakis, the study’s corresponding author at Monash University, framed the takeaway specifically: “The wider message coming from this study is behavioral flexibility. Step targets need not look identical for everyone.” That’s a named researcher, at a named institution, describing what his own data actually showed — not a general “experts say” claim standing in for real attribution.
That framing matters if you’ve ever felt discouraged by a step count that seemed impossible to hit on a given day. The research suggests the rigid “10,000 or it didn’t count” mindset may be giving you less credit than your actual activity deserves.
Why this doesn’t mean one routine fits everyone
This is a reported research finding, not a prescription for what you personally should do with your own walking habits. The study describes a population-level pattern across tens of thousands of people — it isn’t a guarantee about what will happen for any one individual’s health, and it isn’t a substitute for your own doctor’s guidance if you have a specific health condition that affects how you move.
What it does offer is a genuinely useful reframe: if a packed schedule means you can’t fit in a long walk some days, picking up your pace for a shorter one isn’t a consolation prize. According to this research, it may be doing more of the work than you’d assume.
How to tell if you’re actually walking at a “brisk” pace
Eighty-plus steps per minute is faster than a casual stroll but short of a jog — a pace where you could still hold a conversation, but it would take a bit more breath to do it. If you’re not tracking steps per minute directly, a simpler gut check works: can you still talk easily, or are you working a little for it? The second one is closer to the brisk range this study measured.
If you’re newer to intentional walking for health, there’s no need to force a pace that feels uncomfortable right away. The research describes a population pattern measured over years, not a single walk you need to get right today.
What this means for how you think about movement
The step-count target isn’t wrong, exactly — the study’s own lowest-risk range still lands around 7,500 to 10,000 steps. What’s changing is the idea that it’s the only number that counts, or that a shorter, brisker walk somehow doesn’t measure up to a longer, slower one.
If your days don’t always allow for a long walk, this research is a reasonable reason to stop treating that as a failure. A faster pace, even for less time, is doing real work — according to a study of over 100,000 people, not according to a fitness app’s arbitrary round number.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Womens Overview editors prior to publication.