How far off the mark?: The actual amount of steps the average adult takes daily
Physicians, health professionals and many other members of the medical world have long stressed the absolute imperativeness of walking as a means to lose weight and stay in shape. As the most commonly practiced aerobic physical activity in the United States, walking is also one of the easiest forms of exercise as it does not require any equipment or even great shape. Rising in popularity and colloquiality in recent years has been the 10,000 step program, which sets 10,000 steps as daily goal to improve health. Studies investigating the effectiveness of the 10,000 step program have shown clear advantages of the marker that include lowering blood pressure, increasing exercise capacity and improved glucose tolerance on top of the central benefit of weight loss. While the amount of daily target steps is now widely accepted and promoted, a clear number on the average amount of steps taken by adults remains arbitrary.
To rectify the blurriness of this statistic, a meta-analysis was performed using relevant studies that recorded data on the daily number of steps taken for various demographic groups. Only studies that pertained to adults and included mean statistics were used. After sifting through multiple databases that identified as many as 193 potential articles, 42 studies that covered 6,199 subjects were used for the meta-analysis.
The mean number of daily steps ranged from the low of 3,766 for Americans 65 or older, to the high of 18,425 for Amish men. Amish women ranked in at an average of 14,196, still well above the 10,000 step marker, while average steps for the population over 65 years old was 6,565. Excluding Amish subjects, the overall average of daily steps using all studies combined was 9,501.
The study concludes in pointing out a few potential limitations that may have had an impact on the results, as the overall average is considered extremely high compared to many other statistics. The limitations cited were: the fact that there was no study in the meta-analysis that used a random sample from the population, the variation in types of pedometers used for each of the studies, the number of days over which steps were monitored and the inability of some studies to provide all necessary information on subjects (i.e., exact age, gender). In spite of these limitations, the meta-analysis provides an indicator that while the average number of steps taken for adults is high, it doesn't meet the 10,000 step standard. In addition, it is particularly low for the elderly population over 65. These findings should be relayed by physical therapists and health professionals to the general population (especially the elderly population) as further literature on what the normative rate of daily steps is and what it needs to be.
-As reported in the December '07 issue of Physical Therapy
-By Greg Gargiulo
