How Many STEPS Should You Walk To Stay HEALTHY?

Hello Health Champions. Today we're going to talk about how many steps you really need per day for optimal health. So often we hear that number 10,000, 10,000 steps a day, as if there was a magical number. And the reason we keep hearing that is that research has shown that people who walk more, they are healthier. They live longer, they have less disease, they lose weight better, they have lower incidence of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia and so on. But this research also shows that 2,000 steps is a lot better than nothing. And it shows that 10,000 steps is better than 5,000. So more steps walking more is better than walking less for your health. And some research indicates that people have more of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that we can assume our ancestors had. They probably take upwards of 30,000 steps a day. So that would be how much our bodies are genetically designed for or how much we would actually need. But the problem with all this research and all the people quoting the research and trying to come up with guidelines is they don't explain anything about why steps were walking would do this. Is there something magical about steps? So basically these recommendations now just become something else that we should do. But you do not need another should. We need to understand how this stuff works. So first, you need to like yourself enough, you need to care enough about yourself to want to take care of yourself the best way you can. And then you want to understand why steps would help or what other types of activity would help and what it does. And then you can start doing it right. So first of all, it's not really about steps. But it is an indicator of your overall activity because for a lot of people it's the only exercise they get is walking. And therefore if you walk more than you have higher overall activity. But really what this walking or activity does is it provides three things. One is brain stimulation. It provides circulatory benefits and hormonal benefits. Now why would brain stimulation be so important? Because every cell in your body, every tissue works on the principle of use it or lose it. Resources are precious in the body. So if we don't use something, then why keep it around. So basically muscles need tension. The purpose of a muscle is to create tension. If we do that, we get muscles. If we stop doing that, if we have less tension, now we get atrophy. Use it or lose it. Same thing with bones. The purpose of bones is to resist gravity. If we have less gravity or if we have less activity that exposes us to the impact of gravity, now we get osteoporosis. Now the purpose of the brain is to receive and process and produce signals. So if we have enough signals, we're going to have a strong brain. But if we start having less signals for the brain to process, now we get brain degeneration, which is just another word for atrophy, meaning the tissue shrinks and goes away. And if you want to create more signals for the brain, then you need to start understanding where they come from and the vast majority of signals come from movement. We have three tissues primarily, joints, muscles, and tendons that pick up different aspects of motion, and tension, and transmit it to the brain as signals. And motion obviously is all about joints. We have over 300 joints in the body and over 100 of those are in the spine. But it doesn't even end there. It's about receptor density. It's how many receptors we have per square inch. And we need a whole lot more of them where it's important. So receptors increase in density as we get closer to the midline of the body and they increase as we go from the bottom to the top. So basically the spine and closer to the head is where we get the biggest bang for the buck. And even though most of the signals are generated from movement out of those signals, more than 90% are generated from the spine and especially the upper portion of the spine. And if you start understanding some of that, then it's not just how many steps you take, but it is how you walk. And there's a huge difference if you walk actively and you create some motion in the whole body, or if you're just staring at your phone and stepping along like this. It's not the number of steps. It is how many signals are generated as you do it. So here's what's happening when you walk. If you have a person who's facing this way, then they have different curves in the spine. And the first curve in the neck is called Lordosis, a Lordotic curve. And then as you get into the chest, it turns the other way and it's called a kyphosis. Then you get into the lumbars and now it turns the other way again and then it finishes in the sacrum. So we basically have one, two, three curves. And these act as shock absorbers. It's like a spring that as you're walking and bouncing a little bit, then the brain and the head and the tissues are protected by this spring action. And this is one more curve than most other land animals are going to have. If they walk on all fours, if they're not fully upright, then they only need two curves. But with these three curves, we have more shock absorption when we're walking fully upright. So therefore your posture when you're walking is hugely important because if you have a proper posture and you're upright, now these curves are going to flow one into the other, they're going to cooperate. You're going to get more motion from each little bounce of the spring. You're going to get more signals generated into the brain. Whereas if you don't have a good posture, if you're walking hunched over and you're looking at your iPad or your phone, now you're not getting nearly the same number of signals generated. Another thing that matters with the posture is the intensity. So you basically have one, if we look at the body from the top, now there is one axis through the hips and one axis through the shoulders. So if you're walking in a full range of motion and swinging your arms, now you're going to have a rotation, a counter rotation between the shoulders and the hips. And now we're getting more of that motion into the body. The next benefit is circulatory. When you walk, you increase your heart rate, you increase your circulation. And when you pump more blood, you increase the oxygenation. You deliver more oxygen and more nutrients to every cell in the body. And while the blood is doing that, it's also picking up more waste. So it's a form of detox. It's assisting your body in its detoxification process. But just how much blood are you pumping? What is the circulation? So let's just give a couple of examples here that your heart fills up with blood and then when it's full, it squeezes it back out. That's called stroke volume, the amount. And that's roughly 70 milliliters. And on average, people have about a heart rate of 70 beats per minute. So we multiply that out and we get five liters of blood circulating every minute. And that's also roughly how much blood a normal person has, five liters. So you circulate all your blood on average every minute at rest. But when you exercise, now you increase the circulation. So the blood is also coming back faster to the heart. And it's filling up the heart faster and more. So if we fill it more, the heart is going to squeeze harder more effectively. And we could actually double that stroke volume. And if we increase the stroke volume and the heart rate, we could pump as much as 17 liters of blood in something as simple as walking. It's not even like maximum effort here. And even if these numbers don't apply exactly to you, it gives you the idea that you can dramatically increase that circulation by something as simple as walking. But there are more benefit than just the heart pumping. There are other pumping mechanisms from exercise. So when you walk, there is a squeezing of the calf. And you have veins in the calf that the muscle squeeze on it and it helps return the blood to the heart. And this is very important mechanism. And this is also why walking helps reduce very-coast veins. Because we help reduce that venous pressure in the lower extremity. And one more pumping mechanism is in all of the joints. So in every joint, you have something called synovial fluid. And it's very important for the body to keep the blood circulation separate from the inside of the joint with the synovial fluid is because those red blood cells could destroy the joint. And therefore, the blood only gets to the outside of the joint and the inside of the joint is very poorly oxygenated. So the nutrients and the oxygen are diffused by a pumping mechanism. As we move the joint, we can squishing that fluid around and that is how we get new fluid in and old fluid and nutrients and waste out. So cartilage, for example, has no vascularity. There are no blood vessels in cartilage, but we still need to get some nutrients there. Cartilage heals very, very slowly if at all, but we still need to get some nutrients there and this pumping action from motion is what drives that. So here, you basically want to think of SpongeBob that if you squeeze the fluid out and then you let go, now it's going to suck fluid back in. So that's another very important mechanism from exercise and walking. But exercise also has hormonal benefits and one of those is that you increase growth hormone with all activity. There's a little bit of growth hormone increase and there's also an increase in something called BDNF, brain derived, neurotrophic factor and these two put together are essential for making new synapses, for making new pathways in the brain, for improving neuroplasticity and helping the brain learn and in all the other things the brain does. So there's an enormous benefit to exercise for brain health and another benefit is that it will reduce the dependence on insulin. Walking, you will use up some carbohydrates that will reduce the need for insulin, but more so, the cells, the muscles, when they're active, they don't need hardly any insulin to get the glucose into the muscle. So an active muscle is much more insulin sensitive and it's not enough just to walk. If you have a fatty liver and you're extremely insulin resistance, if you're metabolically unhealthy, that's not going to be enough just to do some walking, but it's one part of the solution. So it absolutely helps. Now once we talk about all these benefits of growth hormone BDNF and insulin, I talk a lot about those on this channel and the most powerful way to address that is high intensity exercise and fasting. That's what's going to make the biggest change in these, but like I said, every part counts and walking absolutely helps. But what is so special about walking? Is there anything special? Because most of the benefits that we talked about, the brain stimulation, the circulatory, the hormonal, we can get from all kinds of different activities, but there is one thing that's special about walking and that is called cross crawl. So we have a gate pattern. Now when you're walking, you're moving one leg forward and the opposite arm forward at the same time. So left leg forward, right arm forward, right leg forward, left arm forward. That's called a cross crawl pattern. That's our normal gate pattern. Now why is that so important? Because it is something that is patterned into our nervous system and it is one of the most fundamental and the strongest, the most powerful patterns. It has a huge influence on how the brain is organized. And what they have found actually is that there is a strong connection between babies who don't get to crawl and an increased risk for attention deficit for an increased risk of dyslexia. And kids who don't get to crawl properly also are more poorly coordinated. They don't have as much coordination. And because of that, they are more prone to injuries. And hopefully you can see that this is mostly about creating signals at this point. And if we want to create more signals, then there are certain factors that influence how many signals we create. So speed, the velocity of a movement is highly influential. The amplitude, if we make a small motion or a big motion, makes a big difference and the number of repetitions. So if you do it once, it's not very much. If you're walking and you get a thousand repetitions, that starts adding up. And the fourth factor is the complexity. If we do something very repetitive, it's not very challenging for the brain. Now walking is great for the reasons we talked about because it reinforces a very basic organizational pattern in the body. But if we want to create more signals overall, we also want to do things that are complex. So if we involve more variety, it's more challenging for the brain. So arm swing is one factor for complexity. And we want to make sure that we swing our arms, that we have a full arm swing and symmetrical arm swing. One of the first signs of neural degenerations, such as Parkinson's and dementia, is a loss of arm swing. When people walk like this very often, it's because their brains don't work well enough to create an arm swing. So it's a sign of degeneration, but you can also use it as therapy by swinging your arms more. You're creating more signals. You're reinforcing those beneficial patterns. If you want to increase complexity in other ways, then you can walk on uneven terrain. Because now when the ground is uneven, now there is more adapting, more compensating, more adjusting for the brain to do. So something like trail hiking will improve the complexity. And if you get out in the wilderness, where everything is completely unpredictably, I have to step over things and bend under things. Now there's even more complexity there. But a lot of activities with varied behavior are totally fine things like dancing or tennis and badminton, where you move quickly in different directions. And you have to use a lot of balance and agility. All of these are great examples of how to increase the complexity and increase the signal. So if you understand this, then it's not about just strapping on some step counter and getting to 10,000. You can get a lot more benefit with fewer steps if you understand how this works. So my recommendation is that you do something because something is a lot better than nothing when it comes to exercise. And the next rule is that more is better until it is not. So it's very possible to overtrain and people who get really hooked on an activity, they sort of get addicted to it. And that's not what we're looking for. If you're overtraining, then you might start feeling worn down. And that's how you can notice. If you pay attention to the body, if you're losing some of the spring in your step, if you start getting aches and pains, if you don't feel fresh going into a workout, or if it feels like you're not recovering properly, then it's probably time to back off. And everyone has a different starting point, but I think 30 minutes per day of gentle to moderate activity would be something to strive for. And I put 30 plus here, because if you keep it at a low intensity like walking or hiking, then you really can do it for hours every day and you're not going to wear yourself down. But it comes down to your level of fitness and how much time you have on your hands and your overall joint health and so forth. So just use common sense, but at least 30 minutes, probably five, six times a day, I would not strive for seven times a day unless it's very gentle, because you do want to give your body some recovery. And then I suggest you add some stretching, because stretching also sends massive amounts of signals to the brain, but it also acts as a reset. So your body and your brain talks all the time. The brain gets a certain sense of the length of the muscles and the tension on the tendons. And when you stretch, you're helping the brain create a reset. So it's like the brain gets back to a baseline and start understanding the body better. And then you want to add some variety, because we talked about all the benefits of walking like the gate pattern, that's a special benefit, but walking is not very complex. It's not all that demanding. It's pretty repetitive. So you put the walking, the steps in as a foundation, and then you add some variety, you add different hobbies, whatever you enjoy doing. And if you're one of those hundreds and millions of people who get blood work every year by your doctor, but no one ever explains to you what it means, then you might consider taking my blood work course. I release that for people who want to understand more about their body to take charge of their health. So if you understand your markers and you understand the early changes, now you don't have to wait for it to become a problem. If you can catch things like anemia and hypothyroid and insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes and understand these markers at a very early level, then you never have to be develop the problem. That's what prevention is. And in this course, we'll also talk about some of the reasons and what to look for in terms of stubborn weight. Why does everyone seem to lose weight five times faster than you do? And also a huge problem is people don't understand the real risk factors for heart disease. They just look at the total cholesterol. If it's over 200, the doctor says, here's your prescription for a statin where total cholesterol is one of the last things that you want to be concerned with when it comes to risk of heart disease. So by understanding all of this and really taking ownership of your health, now you can take charge and make some changes and improve your health and reduce your risk for disease. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.