New photo DR MICHAEL MOSLEY: Forget those 10,000 steps a day... you just need three brisk ten-minute walks

Last Christmas someone kindly bought me a Fitbit. For the uninitiated, it is a fitness tracker you wear on your wrist. It counts your steps, distance travelled and heart rate and uses those things to calculate how many calories you’ve burned. The device can even track how long you sleep.

For a couple of weeks I used it every day, monitoring my daily activity and making sure I reached the magic 10,000 daily steps recommended by the Government for optimum health. Then, some time around mid-January, it went into a drawer where it has remained ever since.

Why? Well, it was partly because I found constantly trying to hit the 10,000 steps a day target so hard to achieve.

Dr Michael Mosley questions whether the science behind the 10,000-steps-a-day figure works

But it was also because I discovered that the 10,000 steps figure is not based on rigorous scientific studies. In fact, it was the result of a 1960s marketing campaign in Japan. In the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a Japanese firm came up with a pedometer called a Manpo-Kei. In Japanese, ‘man’ means 10,000, ‘po’ means steps and ‘kei’ means meter. So it was, literally, a 10,000 steps meter. It was then heavily advertised to health-conscious Japanese.

It obviously made a big impression. But do you really have to do 10,000 steps to improve your physical and mental fitness?

Power of the 'Active 10' Plan

To find out, I got together with Professor Rob Copeland, from Sheffield Hallam University, to conduct an experiment in which we would compare the benefits of doing 10,000 steps against a plan called Active 10.

With Active 10, you don’t need to count steps. You simply aim to do three brisk ten-minute walks a day. This adds up to about 3,000 steps, or around 1½ miles – clearly a much shorter distance.

First we recruited a small group of sedentary middle-aged volunteers and equipped them with fitness trackers.

Three ten-minute brisk walks a day adds up to around 3,000 steps, or around 1.5 miles

Rob then split them into two groups: one was asked to hit the 10,000-step target while the other was asked to do Active 10. The latter group were asked to keep their pace up so they would be working the heart and lungs. As Prof Copeland told them: ‘You are aiming to walk fast enough so that you can still talk but not sing.’

A few days later, we met up with our volunteers again and looked at their activity monitors. It turned out that those who had been asked to do 10,000 steps had mostly managed to hit their target but they had struggled.

The Active 10 group, on the other hand, had found it relatively easy to squeeze three brisk walks into a busy day.

So reaching 10,000 steps daily was harder to do – but was it any better for health? Prof Copeland thinks not. ‘According to the trackers, the Active 10 group were more often walking briskly enough that it counted as moderate to vigorous physical activity, even though they moved for less time. And it’s when you are doing a moderate-intensity activity that you are starting to get the greatest health benefits.’

It other words, although the Active 10 group did much less walking, they got more out of it.

A boost for the BRAIN and the BODY

SO doing a few short brisk walks a day is good for your physical fitness, but what about your brain? Plenty of studies have shown that prolonged exercise will keep your brain young, but can a few short walks make any difference?

To find out, researchers from the University of California recruited 36 volunteers and asked them to either sit still for ten minutes or to pedal gently for the same amount of time.

They were then asked to do a memory test, where they were shown images of things such as trees and asked to press a button when they saw an image that was the same as an earlier one.

Surprisingly, volunteers did much better on this test after ten minutes of gentle cycling than they did when they had just sat around doing nothing.

Even more surprising, when the researchers repeated the experiment, but this time with the volunteers doing the memory test inside a brain scanner, they found that ten minutes of exercise had led to visible changes in their brains.

There were striking improvements in the connections between the hippocampus, which is the area of the brain associated with memory, and those areas linked with learning.

Do you have a question for Dr Mosley? 

Email drmosley@mailonsunday.co.uk or write to him at The Mail on Sunday, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT. Dr Mosley can only answer in a general context and cannot give personal replies. 

So what is going on? Nobody knows for sure, but Professor Michael Yassa, who led the research, believes this shows that even ten minutes of gentle exercise may enhance blood flow to the brain and cause healthy chemical changes.

He also thinks these findings are important for middle-aged people, as the hippocampus is one of the first areas of the brain to deteriorate as we age.

‘We are not talking about marathons,’ says Prof Yassa. ‘It looks as if people can improve their memory with a short walk or an easy session of something like yoga.’

So although when it’s cold and wet you may not fancy exercising, you owe it to your brain to get a little more active.

If you’d like some help, you can download a free Public Health England activity tracker app.

Ask Dr Mosley: Your questions answered 

I am a 59-year-old woman with atrial fibrillation and would benefit greatly from losing a few stone. I had some success with 5:2, but within a couple of weeks my condition was much worse. Should I persevere and put up with the symptoms?

I am often asked by readers with long-term health conditions if the New 5:2 is right for them. To answer this medical question, I asked my wife Clare – You magazine’s GP columnist – to comment.

She said: ‘The New 5:2 is an excellent way to lose weight but it may not be suitable for those with atrial fibrillation, which causes an irregular heartbeat, putting you at risk of a stroke due to a blood clot.

‘Most patients with AF take warfarin tablets, which thin the blood. The problem with warfarin and the 5:2 or any intermittent fasting plan is that the sudden reduction in food on the fast days may affect the degree of blood-thinning.

‘On some days the blood may be too thick, risking a blood clot, or else too thin, risking a stroke. However, this is not such an issue for most other blood-thinning medication such as the newer anticoagulants, which do the same thing as warfarin but in a different way. This is just one of the reasons why those people with a significant medical condition should seek advice before embarking on such a diet.

‘Losing weight, if you need to, undoubtedly benefits heart health. Even if you can’t do the 5:2, your doctor may be able to advise on another healthy balanced diet that will help you slim.’

 

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News Pictures DR MICHAEL MOSLEY: Forget those 10,000 steps a day... you just need three brisk ten-minute walks 

You don’t have to pack away your bikini just because you’re the wrong side of 20. These body-beautiful stars reveal their secrets to staying in shape and prove you can smoulder in a two-piece, whatever your age. Read on and be bikini inspired!

TEENS
Hayden Panettiere
Size: 8
Age: 18
Height: 5ft 1in
Weight: 8st

To achieve her kick-ass figure, Hayden – who plays cheerleader Claire Bennet in Heroes – follows the ‘quartering’ rule. She eats only a quarter of the food on her plate, then waits 20 minutes before deciding whether she needs to eat again.

Hayden says: “I don’t have a model’s body, but I’m not one of those crazy girls who thinks that they’re fat. I’m OK with what I have.”

Nicollette says: “I don’t like diets – I see it, I eat it! I believe in eating healthily with lots of protein, vegetables and carbs to give you energy.”

kim cattrall

Size: 10-12
Age: 52
Height: 5ft 8in
Weight: 9st 4lb

SATC star Kim swears by gym sessions with Russian kettle bells (traditional cast-iron weights) and the South Beach Diet to give her the body she wants. To avoid overeating, Kim has a radical diet trick – squirting lemon juice on her leftovers – so she won’t carry on picking.

Kim says: “I am no super-thin Hollywood actress. I am built for men who like women to look like women.”
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