It’s 2025, and walking 10,000 steps a day is one of the most popular fitness goals on the planet.

The scientific rationale is dubious – research suggests that doing 7,000 to 8,000 steps a day offers optimal return for your health. But the human psyche loves having a nice, round number to aim for, and if a step goal encourages people to move more, it’s hardly a bad thing.

However, a 2024 paper published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports suggests there’s more to consider than just how many steps you do if you want to maximise benefits such as losing weight, lowering your blood pressure and decreasing your blood sugar levels.

The article shows that both exercise quantity and quality (ie. intensity) are associated with the five cardiovascular risk factors for metabolic syndrome; elevated waist circumference, high triglycerides, low HDL (or “good” cholesterol), high blood pressure and high blood sugar.

To improve these, “the analysis says you can get away with just doing a higher volume of exercise, but you’re better off doing a higher volume and a higher intensity of exercise in combination,” the paper’s lead author Dr Elroy Aguiar tells me. “It’s the combination of quantity and quality that gives you the best benefit.”

In other words, incorporating a slightly faster spell of walking into each day could have significant positive impacts.

How to walk 10,000 steps a day for optimal health results

The good news is, particularly for those newer to exercise, upping your exercise quality doesn’t need to mean signing up for several sweaty HIIT classes or committing to sprint intervals. It can be as simple as walking a bit faster.

“Accumulating a high volume of walking throughout the day, then focussing on doing at least 30 minutes of faster walking or jogging, would be a way to lower your metrics for each of the progressive risk factors,” says Dr Aguiar.

However, even shorter bursts of more intense physical activity were shown to have a positive effect.

“One of the really interesting findings from our paper was that, if you look at people’s highest one minute of activity across each day, averaged across the monitoring period, that was a very strong signal for whether they had one or more of the metabolic syndrome risk factors present,” Dr Aguiar explains. “Even something as little as one minute of high-intensity activity could be beneficial.”

In practice, applying this advice might mean most of your daily steps are performed at your usual pace. Then, you can try to include a brisk stroll while running errands at some point during the day – a higher cadence, or the number of steps you take per minute, has also been linked to improved health outcomes.

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Benefits of focussing on exercise quality and quantity

If you ask people about their fitness goals for 2025, “improving metabolic syndrome risk factors” probably doesn’t crop up too many times. But by breaking it into its requisite parts, the benefits of improved exercise quality and quantity become far more relatable.

“Exercise is one part of a behavioural strategy to lose weight, which would reduce visceral adiposity,” Dr Aguiar explains. Visceral adiposity refers to the fat found around vital organs, deep within the abdominal area.

“We know that if you store fat mass around your abdominal area, that’s more dangerous than storing fat mass in your lower body or subcutaneously [just under the skin]. Visceral fat around your vital organs wreaks a lot of havoc in terms of the metabolic signalling that goes on there. Essentially, it’s dangerous to store a lot of abdominal fat because it changes the way our vital organs in that area function.

“By accumulating a higher volume and intensity of activity, you can reduce your weight and abdominal fat.”

As ever, you’re likely to see the best weight loss results by changing both your activity levels and diet. But exercise alone will still deliver significant benefits.

Read more: Walking for 15 minutes after eating has an ‘immediate effect’ and can protect your health long-term, expert says

“Especially for individuals who are overweight and obese, and may have metabolic syndrome, exercise and behavioural strategies can minimise and reverse risk factors when they are in their early stages,” Dr Aguiar adds.

Blood pressure is another of the metabolic syndrome risk factors that can be improved by increasing the quantity and quality of your weekly physical activity levels.

“Exercise is already well-known to reduce systolic and diastolic blood pressure; that’s called post-exercise hypotension,” Dr Aguiar says. “Within as little as 15 or 20 minutes post-exercise, you can see a decrease in blood pressure from one bout of walking, for example.

“Just going out for a walk at a brisk pace, faster than you would usually, will drop your blood pressure down for up to about 24 hours post-exercise.”

A quick trot is also capable of dropping your blood glucose levels for up to 48 hours, Dr Aguiar adds.

“Each of those metabolic syndrome five risk factors, on a small timescale of hours to days, can benefit from going out for a brisk walk, a slow jog, or something like that. By consistently meeting physical activity guidelines, all five risk factors will improve over time too.”

Read more: A walking expert says ‘10,000 steps a day is a good starting point’ – here’s what to do next

How to increase your activity levels

Overall, Dr Aguiar says the current World Health Organisation’s (WHO) physical activity guidelines provide a solid benchmark to aim for.

They state that “every move counts towards better health,” and each week adults should aim to collect 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity, 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity or a combination of the two. But this blanket prescription can take many forms to fit in with your lifestyle.

“Some people might choose to get most of their activity on the weekend, and some people might choose to break their activity up into smaller periods throughout the day,” Dr Aguiar says.

“You can also use incidental movement. The new WHO messaging says that all movement counts, so if that means walking a little bit more quickly to your car or the train station, just to elevate your heart rate and your metabolic rate a little bit for brief periods you can accumulate throughout the day, those things count in terms of exercise.

“And they’re incidental. We all walk, to some degree; from your office to the bathroom, or to a local cafe. If you can focus on walking a little bit faster than you normally do, that’s going to be beneficial for a lot of these risk factors, especially the blood glucose and blood pressure side of things.”

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