Andrea Marcellus, a health coach who specializes in fitness for busy people, has gone on social media to bust the myth that you have to get in 10,000 steps a day to stay in good shape. The 51-year-old says you would be better off doing 10 minutes of resistance training to lose fat, which is better than walking 10,000 steps in 10 hours. She went on to explain that 10,000 steps is not really the best use of your time and that figure is totally made up anyway. The arbitrary figure has never been grounded in science, but today’s fitness trackers are set to a default goal of 10,000 steps — approximately 5 miles — even though that number may be overkill. Harvard Medical School found that taking an average of 4,400 steps a day is enough to significantly lower the risk of death in women. Marcellus clarified that people should still be walking as much as they can, but it shouldn’t be their main focus when it comes to fitness. She says the ideal daily workout would be 20 minutes of exercise, with 10 minutes of that being some sort of resistance training.
