“I walk every day.” It might be the most common answer we hear when we ask someone about their current exercise routine. And it’s a good answer. Walking is accessible, low risk, and something most people can keep doing for life.
But is it enough? The honest answer is: it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Walking is great for your health, and it also has limits. Understanding both will help you get the most out of it.
Walking Is Better Than You Think
I once heard two well known “influencers” talk on a podcast about how walking is not exercise. This is why it is so hard to take people online seriously when we hear things like this. Sure walking may not be intense, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exercise.
Let’s start with the good news, because there’s a lot of it. A 2023 meta-analysis of 17 studies and nearly 227,000 people found that the risk of death starts to drop at around 4,000 steps a day, and every additional 1,000 steps was linked to a 15% lower risk of dying from any cause. The benefit for cardiovascular death showed up even earlier, at roughly 2,300 steps.
So how much walking do you need each day? There isn’t a clear answer and at some point there is less return on your investment.
A 2022 analysis of 15 studies found the benefits started to level off around 6,000 to 8,000 steps for adults 60 and older, and around 8,000 to 10,000 for younger adults. A 2025 analysis in The Lancet Public Health found that 7,000 steps a day was associated with a 47% lower risk of death compared with 2,000 steps, along with lower risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, depression, dementia, and falls. Beyond about 7,000 steps, the added benefit was small.
These are observational studies so they are showing associations versus cause, but still noteworthy. With so many studies showing the same thing, it makes sense that if you are mostly sedentary, getting more steps in is one of the best things you can do for your health.
How Fast Your Walk Matters Too
It’s not only how much you walk, but how fast. A meta-analysis of cohort studies found that people in the fastest walking-speed group had a 43% lower risk of death from any cause than those in the slowest group. For every 0.1 meter per second increase in walking speed, risk dropped about 6%. Pooled data from British cohorts showed a similar story: people who described themselves as average or brisk walkers had 20% and 24% lower risk of all-cause mortality than slow walkers.
Now the important thing to realize here is that walking speed is really a reflection of how healthy and capable you are. Not that you can just walk faster, but people who do tend to have more muscle, better fitness, and fewer health problems. This is the important piece though. The things that make you a faster walker (strength, power, and cardiovascular fitness) are things you can train.
Exercise Needs To Be A Challenge
Here is the distinction I think we need to make on whether walking is exercise. This really depends on the person. For some that have higher fitness levels, walking is an activity of daily living. It is something your body already does regularly and have adapted to.
Exercise, on the other hand, is a stimulus that challenges your body beyond what you’re typically exposed to in everyday life. You body adapts to the demand of that challenge. If the demand or stress never increases, there is no reason for your body to change.
This is why while walking can be exercise, it does have its limits.
Walking can do many great things for your health and longevity as we previously discussed. But if you are reading this, you probably want to make improvements, not just to be able to do what you can already do.
The biggest limitations of walking is they will have minimal effect on muscle, bone, and cardiovascular fitness.
Muscle. Walking asks your legs to do what they already can do. It doesn’t provide them enough load to build significant muscle. It will make sure you keep the muscle you have to be able to walk, but if you are concerned with building more, walking is not the best form of exercise you can do. Plus there is minimal stress on the upper body muscles, so they are not getting the same effect as the lower body. This is why resistance training must be incorporated regularly.
Bone. Research consistently shows that walking can help slow bone loss, but it rarely increases bone density. The forces involved in walking just aren’t high enough to stimulate bone formation. Bone responds to higher stress with weight bearing activity.
Cardiovascular Fitness. If you are inactive, walking can absolutely improve your fitness. It will increase your heart rate significantly and cause your body to adapt. But once your fitness improves walking will be less of a challenge and your fitness will stop improving. This means we will need to start to incorporate higher levels of intensity in order to continue to see adaptation in fitness.
Why You Need Both
The goal isn’t to choose between walking and harder training. They do different jobs, and they complement each other in a practical way too. You can (and should) walk every day. You can’t do high-intensity training every day, because hard training requires recovery. Walking fills in the days between, keeps you moving, and supports recovery, while strength training and higher-intensity sessions provide the stimulus walking can’t.
The research backs this up. A large analysis that followed more than 147,000 adults for 30 years found the lowest mortality risk in people who did both aerobic activity and resistance training, rather than one or the other.
What This Means For You
Remember there are different forms of exercise and they do different things for your body. The goal is to be active everyday. This means walking everyday is a great way to be active. But depending on your goals, you might need more.
Think of your steps as your baseline, like brushing your teeth. It’s the activity you do every day to stay healthy, and it’s well worth protecting. When you can, walk with a little purpose and pick up the pace.
Then add the stimulus walking can’t provide. A few days a week of strength training covers your muscle and bone, and some higher-intensity cardio pushes the upper end of your cardiovascular fitness. Walking is good. Keep doing it. Just don’t mistake it for the whole picture.
Need help figuring out how to add strength training or higher intensity exercise to your routine? Come set up a free session with us at San Diego Premier Training to learn how we can help you out.