The number of steps you should walk every day to start seeing benefits to your health is lower than previously thought, according to the largest analysis to investigate this. The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, found that walking at least 3967 steps a day started to reduce the risk of dying from any cause, and 2337 steps a day reduced the risk of dying from diseases of the heart and blood vessels (cardiovascular disease).
This is a really cool old study that looks at how people switch to a run in order save energy - at a certain speed (which differs among individuals) it is less costly to run than to walk. We switch to a run because running uses less energy than walking would.
Forcing someone to walk when they’d rather run, or run when they’d rather walk, burns more calories. (And causes injury, but hey, calories burned, baby!)
I remember learning about this applied to various animals, too, and how this plays into the idea of humans being efficient at catching critters to eat because we can jog along for ages and wear them out. We just don’t stop, and eventually the prey drops with exhaustion. BBQ time! Humans: 1, Antelope: 0.
Yeah, persistence hunting! It’s cool stuff.
Another one of the studies I found while googling around about this yesterday mentioned something about kangaroos right at the end, and apparently their fast hopping gate is especially efficient. The mention seemed to come a bit out of the blue right at the end of the conclusion, but I was also just skimming so I may have missed a discussion of kangaroo gaits earlier in the paper.