How to Hit 10,000 Steps a Day

10k steps isn’t like running a marathon. Almost anyone can do it — there’s no training required, and it has an enormous impact on people’s health. But while 89% of Withings users have reached this goal at least once, only 1% manage to do it every day. So we wanted to know: what makes those people special? Well, we crunched the data and found some surprising insights you might benefit from.

See what works

Gooooal! The M-F secret to success

We compared top performers with other users to find any differences in the rhythm of their lives. And yup — turns out that our top performers have patterns that are way different from the masses.

Weekday warriors win
Top performers are the most active from Monday to Friday. They don’t try to make up for it at the end of the week, maybe because they don’t need to. So one key to success? Build regular activity into your weekdays.
Take it easy on the weekend
Sunday is the least active day, on average, for everyone. However, top performers also take it easier on Saturday, while the less successful among us usually hit our maximum on this day.

Part of days in the total weekly activity

Top performers

The others

Get up and get moving!

It’s not about how late you sleep, it’s about how fast you hit the road after you wake up. We found that top performers get moving 2 hours earlier than others. Morning is the moment of the day when they widen the gap with others: the early bird catches the worm!

Top performers get moving much earlier 2 Hoursbefore

Profile of the activity intensity in a day

Top performers

The others

Friends will boost your performance People with friends walk 25% more Our leaderboards aren’t just fun, we found that having one or more friends in your Withings app makes people walk 25% more Invite a friend

No really, you don’t have to do marathons

Having an active life is totally within your reach. Our data shows that people who regularly hit 10,000 steps a day aren’t all ultra-runners. In fact, they run only 1 hour a week on average.

Top performers run 1 Hour/week

vs 14 min for others

The health benefits are real, and really cool.

Walking 10k steps a day helps you...

Enjoy more restorative nights
Top performers go to sleep 16 min earlier and their nights are more restful — the data shows people who regularly hit their step goal are 13% less likely to wake up in the middle of the night.
Master your body’s weight
People who regularly walk 10k steps a day are 9% less likely to be obese. And people who regularly hit their step goal are 2.1 more likely to achieve their target weight.
Strengthen your heart
Walking 10k steps a day on a regular basis can improve your heart health. We see a 10% decrease in the average heart rate among people who walk 10k steps a day.

Relax

People who walk 10k steps a day are 10% less likely to feel stressed out than sedentary people. What's sedentary? Here it is defined as people who walk less than 4000 steps a day, on average.

10 %

Want to make worries melt away? Hit 10k/day and you'll feel less stress than those who don't move much.

Percentage of users feeling stressed

  • less than 4,000 steps
  • 4,000 to 6,900 steps
  • 7,000 to 9,999 steps
  • 10 000 steps or more

About the study

This study was conducted by Withings based on data gathered from a panel of more than 100,000 users of Withings activity trackers.

Withings guarantees the confidentiality of personal data and protects the privacy of all its users. Therefore, all data used for this study was rigorously anonymized and aggregated in order to avoid any re-identification.



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