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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the One Day At Daytime podcast. Today's topic is gonna be the ultimate podcast on steps because yesterday we had a good question in the WhatsApp group, a link to a new study saying, It matters how you do your steps versus just total steps. Bit of confusion, maybe a bit of panic, Oh my God, I've just been getting my steps in throughout my day, through my job, I haven't been going on walks. Does it make a difference now?
Speaker 1:Should I stop walking? You know
Speaker 2:I mean?
Speaker 1:No, you shouldn't stop walking. So it got me thinking, let's do the ultimate podcast on steps. Let's talk about the studies that matter. Let's talk about the takeaways that matter so we can practically take them and actually improve our life with our daily steps. So the first thing is to talk about that first study, it looked at sub optimally active adults.
Speaker 1:So people who got enough steps in a day, 8,000 plus, they were excluded. The average step count, I think in a study for people was about 5,000 steps. And what they did was they checked how they walked for a week, did they go for long walks, did they just do two minute walks, five minute walks, ten minute walks, fifteen minute walks, and then they tracked them for like nearly ten years and saw if they would go basically dead, as simple as that. Did they die in ten years? Did they have anything wrong with them?
Speaker 1:Cardiovascular, blah, blah, blah, blah. And yeah, basically the group that they tested ten years prior that did like fifteen minute walks in their day to get their steps versus the groups that didn't do that, but got the same amount of steps, saw better results basically, less people died, less people had issues from basically going out and having an actual walk versus not. But the key thing here is these are sub optimally active people, so if you were to get those steps in 8,000, 10,000 plus a day, it doesn't really matter, like if it's broken down into a walk or not, but maybe it does for mental health benefits and stuff, which we're going to cover in a bit.
Speaker 2:So, if your step count is low,
Speaker 1:then yeah, it makes sense that you actually go for one walk a day that is about fifteen minutes in length.
Speaker 2:This is a hack really because you're getting
Speaker 1:the same steps as someone else that doesn't do and you get extra benefits, and the act of going for a walk, maybe fifteen minutes helps you a bit with your cardiovascular if you don't do much steps, helps with getting your muscles looser, helps with your mindset, fresh air, circadian rhythm if you're going out in the day. There's a lot of things that can come into a short walk. And if you can do the walk in nature, then by all means do that because it's better than like a concrete jungle walk. So yeah, the hack is if you are low on steps, at least get a fifteen minute walk in a day and you're going do a lot of things to help you, the chance of you dying going down from cardiovascular disease and stuff like that. The second study is the volume,
Speaker 2:the big study done on the
Speaker 1:47,000 people, and they looked at the total amount of steps people did a day. And then again, did you die? Did you get cardiovascular disease? And what is the step take that you need to do to avoid it or to reduce your risk? So, for adults 60, the benefits increased and then leveled off from 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day, so you can imagine you get these huge amount of benefits from going from 4,000 steps a day to 8,000 steps a day.
Speaker 1:And remember, it's realistic. It's not something super, super difficult. It can feel like a lot of steps doing 8,000 to 10,000 in a day when you don't do it often. But imagine the gains you get are incredible. And if you're over 60, you get the benefits from between 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day.
Speaker 1:So as long as you get into those zones, you're getting the benefits of walking. Doing more steps than that, it levels off diminishing returns. You don't necessarily need to do more. So just try and get to those ranges. And I think if you can work hard, but it didn't to your time.
Speaker 1:I know some of you got different types of jobs, you've got injuries, disabilities and stuff as well, makes it hard to move. Try and do what you can and just try an inch closer, step by step, two more steps, which brings me to the next study that showed, does even walking 1,000 steps more a day help? Like, what's the point if I just did 1,000 steps more? Does that matter, Scott? I can't be bothered.
Speaker 1:No way does that help. So, what happened here was it was a 2023 meta analysis and wanted to answer this question, does incremental benefits happen when you do this? So, when they walked 1,000 more steps a day than they used to, for every thousand steps a day increase they had, they had a fifteen percent decrease in risk of dying from any cause. And the 500 steps increase a day was linked to seven percent decrease in risk of dying from heart disease. So you can imagine 500 steps a day extra.
Speaker 1:Come on, you can do that. We can
Speaker 2:do this. 500 steps a
Speaker 1:day extra. Do that for a week. Okay, that's your new normal. Can you add another 500? Can you
Speaker 2:add another 500? You know what I mean? Can you make
Speaker 1:it that you wake up in the morning, you get out to do no matter the weather and go for a short walk? Five minutes, ten minutes. If you've got dogs, it's easy. If you're busy working and you think, I can't do it, my work is rammed, even lunchtime, I'm working. I'm like, Well, find a balance in your work.
Speaker 1:Like your boss is not going to give you balance. Why would they do that? They want you to work. You need to say, Hey, this is
Speaker 2:my lunch break, buddy, and I'm gonna go for a walk
Speaker 1:and I'm gonna have at least thirty minutes of activity time. And then you don't need to eat for one hour lunchtime if you're working in an office or something. Come on, who needs one hour to eat? Those are ridiculous. You can just do ten, fifteen minutes of your food, the rest of it you can just go for a walk.
Speaker 1:The great Steve Jobs, who I'm a big fan of, used to take all his meetings walking in nature because it was just something good for the mind. So yeah, it's important to do that and when we think about all of this together, there's like something called the Pareto Principle, the power law, and yeah, it really is like, if you can get to 8,000 steps a day, you don't need to worry about if you're doing fifteen minute walks or not. If you're doing 5,000 steps a day, perhaps make sure you get a fifteen minute walk in or a ten minute walk in because you're going to get a bit of benefit from the study for doing that. So that's important. That's quite a quick checklist of doing.
Speaker 1:And then just knowing that you can go up a thousand steps a day on average or 500 steps a day on average gives you these health benefits. That's amazing too. So there's a lot of benefits from just moving a bit more with steps. 100% fact, get on with it, make it a priority in your life. And interestingly, looking at research, I remember seeing something about walking and mental health and EMDR therapy, and I'm going to read the notes out that are from this audiobook that I got it from about where you walk in nature versus pavement.
Speaker 1:So, it's called a green exercise. And yeah, it's fascinating topic. So, the research, a classic one is from Stanford compared participants who walked for ninety minutes in natural grassy area with participants who walked in ninety minutes urban, high traffic area. The nature walking group showed significant mental health benefits than the urban walking group did not. Brain scans showed that the nature group had a subgenual prefrontal cortex, reduced activity there, which is part of the brain linked to rumination, the cycle of brooding over negative thoughts, a key factor in depression.
Speaker 1:Stress hormones: Other studies consistently show that walking in nature, even in city parks, lowers levels of the stress hormone cortisol and reduces blood pressure and heart rate more than walking built up urban environments. And here's the fascinating one, EMDR therapy. I think some of you heard of it if you've got into the topic of trauma, and it was built on this, right? So, the emerging area of neuroscience, EMDR. So the mechanism is bilateral stimulation, BLS, and then EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is a formal therapy, right?
Speaker 1:How it works, the theory. When you walk, you are in forward motion. This is the theory behind it. This creates optic flow, visual motion of the environment passing you by on both sides. Your eyes naturally scan left and right to take in the scenery.
Speaker 1:The brain science. This left, right, left, right sensory input is the bilateral part. This side to side stimulation is believed to engage both hemispheres of the brain. This process is thought to help soothe the amygdala, the brain's emotional threat center, and allow the prefrontal cortex, the logic planning part of the brain, to process difficult memories and or emotions. And why it feels good.
Speaker 1:This is why walking is so effective of clearing your head, processing a problem or thinking things through. Sometimes you get an insight, an idea into your mind when you're walking and it's like a breakthrough. It's because you've let your brain relax a bit. It's processing things. Things are flowing.
Speaker 1:We need to
Speaker 2:be in that state sometimes. And you're
Speaker 1:not just getting exercise, you're literally engaging in a neurological state that is ideal for problem solving and emotional regulation. In fact, okay, EMDR therapy was famously invented by its founder, Francine Shapiro, when she noticed her own distressing thoughts faded as she walked in the park and her eyes were darting back and forth. So the creator of EMDR therapy got this insight from a walk which stimulates a similar thing, not the exact same as EMDR therapy.
Speaker 2:So that's quite crazy. I think it's quite crazy.
Speaker 1:So basically, if you still don't if you haven't got off your ass right now after listening to this podcast, Gay Steps In, I don't know what else has said
Speaker 2:to you guys. Like, I can't do more. I can't do more to get you
Speaker 1:off your ass and get moving and get walking because it's so motivating to know there's very little steps you've got to do a day to get the benefits. Like, I don't want you all to be thinking when you're old and gray and, you know, God pops into your brain and says, Hey buddy, do you know if you walk just another 2,000 steps on average a day over the last thirty years, you'd be in a far better position now and you'd have another five years to live or you wouldn't have these problems? And you'd go, Shut up, mate. 2,000 extra steps a day, that's nothing.
Speaker 2:How much? Ask about twenty minutes of walking a day. You kick yourself, man. Twenty minutes a day just to reduce the risk of these things massively. Come on.
Speaker 2:Come on. I've just been rereading Steve Jobs' biography,
Speaker 1:reread his sister, Mona Simpson, his eulogy when he passed away, and his last dying words and sentences were about how he is saying sorry that he is leaving them and he wished he did things differently with his family because one of his daughters, Lisa, he didn't treat so well at the start of his life and his other kids, he wished you to spend more time with them. And he was a dying man. I'm not saying walking is going to help him, he died of cancer, okay? But he, even the guy who was fanatical about work was saying, you know, I wish I just had more time with my family, more functional time. There's a big lesson in that.
Speaker 1:A lot of lessons in old age and care homes people go around
Speaker 2:the same thing. Now, if
Speaker 1:you can reverse engineer how to get into a better position, you don't have to go in the future right now. You don't have to you can just say, I can reduce these odds now by taking action today because all you have to do is action today. You can't do action tomorrow. You can't
Speaker 2:do the next week. The only time
Speaker 1:you can act is now and today. So, take action now, get your steps in, be serious about it, go to bed, wake up the next day, you see it as a new day, new leaf. Don't think too much about other days in the future. You have to for some stuff like if you've to pay like a mortgage payment coming up and money's not insured, you've to start planning that stuff. When it comes to our healthy behaviors, you can be a healthy person today by doing these key actions and that's the key thing.
Speaker 1:And focus on the Pareto principle, like just getting to 4,000 to 6,000 steps or 6,000 to 8,000 steps depending on your age, walking a thousand steps more a day, like these have huge benefits that they seem small in the grand picture, but
Speaker 2:punch big, They punch very big and this
Speaker 1:is how everything works. This is everything works. It's just important to do that. So that's the ultimate podcast on steps. I hope you found it interesting.
Speaker 1:I hope you're motivated. And I'm going to get up now and go for a little walk to the shop, even if it's ten minutes, fifteen minutes, because I know if I'm on a low step day, that's going to be beneficial for me and it's easy for me to do. And I don't want regret when I'm older, God coming into my
Speaker 2:brain saying, Hey, buddy, if you
Speaker 1:just did a bit more steps, you wouldn't be here right now. And I would really hate myself. So have a good day, guys. I'll see you soon.