Step aside, feel-good myth.
This widely recommended goal of 10,000 steps daily is actually a 60-year-old marketing misconception.
We now know that significantly fewer daily steps – 2,300 to 7,000 – help strengthen the heart and blood vessels and reduce the risk of premature death, stroke and depression.
But how much do you need to protect your brain?
New research from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston has discovered exactly how many daily steps are associated with better cognitive performance.
Step it up
Instead of relying on potentially inaccurate self-reported step counts like most previous studies, this new study used objective Fitbit data.
Researchers collected data from 2009 to 2023 (14 years) from 3,093 participants aged 18 to 93. The average age was 58 years old.
They found that people’s step habits generally fell into three groups: The least active group took an average of 5,108 daily steps, the moderately active group took about 8,875, while the most active took about 14,161.
Then the researchers put them to the test. Specifically, four tests to measure performance across attention span, delay of gratification, recognizing emotional cues, and ignoring distractions.
Overall, the moderately and most active groups performed better than the least active group on tests measuring sustained attention, ignoring distractions, and delayed gratification.
But the most active group did not outperform the moderately active group on each 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 always better.
Every additional 1,000 steps per day at a moderate pace (about 9 minutes) improves sustained attention scores, ignoring distractions and delayed gratification.
Blood pressure
Participants’ Fitbits also gave researchers insight into their blood pressure, which the researchers said could be lowered by physical activity, leading to better cognitive performance.
What they found was that higher systolic blood pressure (the highest number in a measurement measuring the pressure of blood pumped out of the heart) was associated with slightly worse performance in delayed gratification and decision-making.
However, this was not significantly related to other cognitive abilities. The researchers believe that overall, blood pressure may explain a small part – about 5% – of the relationship between physical activity and decision-making scores.
Does this research actually apply to you?
The researchers acknowledge that they studied a very specific population of people: almost all of them had a college education and had health insurance. Three out of four participants were white, and more than 68% of them were women.
This raises the question of whether their research can be applied to people outside of these groups.
Additionally, they only measured cognitive performance once, so they don’t know whether participants’ step counts helped combat cognitive decline. It’s also possible that people with better cognitive function are also more active.
“Our results support an association between long-term physical activity and later cognitive performance, but they do not prove that physical activity leads to better cognition,” author Olaoluwa Okusaga told ScienceAlert.
You may have noticed that the researchers only observed trends in three of the four tests.
The researchers suggest that the last test, recognizing emotional signals, might involve different parts of the brain than other tests, or that their tests were not sensitive enough to detect differences in people’s abilities.
Gn Health
