There’s good news for those who never quite manage to hit the 10,000 steps a day target: it turns out you did not really need them anyway, according to new research.
American academics have found that walking 6,000 steps each day could reduce the risk of early death for over-60s and taking more than 8,000 has no added benefits.
The team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst analysed data from 15 studies that examined nearly 50,000 people from four continents.
The researchers looked at the effect of daily steps on the mortality rate from all causes of death.
They sorted the 47,471 adults from the studies into four groups based on their average daily steps. The first averaged 3,500 steps; the second, 5,800; the
