10,000 Steps or a Short Walk?

There are ample other sources validating that 10k steps is completely arbitrary.

Yeah, more steps burn calories, and some people like getting steps. Go, them.

There are many routes to weight loss (with activity varying from no change to intense multi-hour workouts, in different people's cases). For most of us, eating habits are a bigger deal than exercise.

There are also many routes to cardiovascular health . . . and even many sub-types of cardiovascular health.

There aren't just two choices, or even 3: 10k steps vs. 15 minute walks vs. 5 minute walks. All of that would be a yawn for me.

Add fun activity to life - that's my jam. If a person likes intensity, work up to that. If a person likes volume/duration, work up to that. There are dozens - probably hundreds - of different activities that raise heart rate. Most of them are good for cardiovascular health.

Personally, I like a nice zone 2 on-water row or bike ride . . . with sometimes a zone 3, 4, or 5 in there, too. I average around 5k steps a day, just from doing regular life stuff, not much intentional exercise walking at all. In Summer, it's more steps; in Winter, it's fewer. I don't pay steps much attention. I lost weight fine doing that. I've maintained a healthy weight for 9+ years since loss. My cardiovascular health - cardiovascular endurance, lipid levels, blood pressure, blood sugar, resting heart rate, ability to tolerate intensity, estimated VO2max, and more - is fine now . . . kind of excellent for my age, actually.

There's not just one successful path. There are lots of potential successful paths. Finding the personally right one is what matters, whether that's 10k steps, 15 minute walks, a fun cardiovascular sport, or something else.

I have to admit: "Consistently failing to live up to a smartwatch demand" kinda made me LOL. Yeah, that doesn't sound like fun. To me. 😉 But neither does daily 15-minute forced marches. 😆

I have to ask: What is a "zone 2 influencer" and why are they saying activity wouldn't count because "the zone 2 would be interrupted with bursts of higher intensity"?

Wouldn't count for what? Weight loss? Cardiovascular health? Fitness improvement?

I have to admit, as someone pretty steeped in a cardiovascular sport, and attentive to my weight, I have no idea why zone 2 wouldn't count because it would be interrupted by higher bursts. It kind of blows my mind.

I hope this isn't the "fat is only burned in zone 2" idea.

Many people's zone 2 isn't necessarily even zone 2, because so many people use 220-age as HRmax, and it's inaccurate for quite a few people. In addition, some zone-estimation methods use raw percent of max heart rate, which has pros and cons as compared to the heart rate reserve method of estimating zones (Karvonen method - which also considers resting heart rate).

If I believed I was in zone 2 (60-70%) based on raw HRmax and 220-age, I'd almost never be in zone 2 during exercise - nearly always above it. That method would have my zone 2 as 91-106bpm. Based on a tested max a few years back (and RPE currently) and using Karvonen, zone 2 is more like 129-142bpm.

I was so shocked by this idea that I did a little web searching to try to figure out the rationale. (I gather that Attia is in the mix, and longevity is part of the rationale). Zone 2 is fine, probably should be a lot of zone 2 in good training plans. But bursts of zone 3, 4, and even 5 aren't a terrible thing, as long as someone has the conditioning to do them, and is using them in appropriate dosages.

Certainly, HIIT is oversold in the current blogosphere - all high intensity all the time is Not Good, and it's especially bad for relative beginners. But "never exceed zone 2" is a weird idea to me.

Yes, different zones have different cardiovascular benefits.

If a person has athletic goals in a cardiovascular sport, I think it's worth understanding the benefits and risks of each zone, and following sensible training plans for that sport.

For someone whose goals are weight loss, I think what matters most is fatigue: Overdoing increases fatigue, makes us rest more and do less, so burn fewer calories than expected. The definition of "overdoing" is individual, i.e., depends on things like training history, health history, etc. Generically, either too much volume (duration), too little recovery (frequency), excessive intensity or a combination of those can be "overdoing". I feel like common sense can give us hints about whether we're overdoing.

If the goals are primarily health, personally I think there are benefits of doing whatever low/mid intensity exercise is fun, and mixing in a little bit of high intensity now and then, without being too obsessive about the details. That sounds like what you may be thinking, too.

With goals like health or weight loss, I think it's easy to overthink this stuff, even lose common sense. There are IMO a lot of "internet influencers" who develop partial understanding, treat nuanced things in a binary black/white way, and sell others on silly ideas via their clickbait. (I'm not necessarily putting Attia in that category, but maybe some of his followers. He does have his critics, though.) Sites don't get many clicks from "do a mix of fun exercise that develops your fitness but doesn't cause over-fatigue or major injury risk". Booorrrrring.

IMO, harm has been done by the trendiness of high-intensity exercise, HIIT in various forms being the most common. If the "zone 2 influencers" are trying to counter that, I guess I get it. Especially for beginners, high intensity exercise does have much more risk of overdoing, injury, and that sort of thing. Some of that risk persists, but as a person becomes more conditioned to a specific activity, the issues become more nuanced.

There are people here on MFP who tell folks never to go over zone 2 as some kind of universal directive. I think that's wrong. But overdoing for one's current conditioning level is also wrong - sub-ideal - whether the goals are weight loss or fitness improvement.

It's utterly bizarre to me that anyone would say venturing into "bursts above zone 2" is destructive. I should be dead by now, I guess. 😜🙄 (I turn 70 in a couple weeks, BTW . . . so far, very undead, thankfully.) I've been active in my sport for around 23-24 years. As recently as this Summer, I've occasionally spent several continuous minutes - like 10-15 minutes - above 220 minus age heart rate - zone 4, with a small bit of zone 5, as raw percent of actual HRmax. There was no obvious penalty beyond some short-term fatigue on that day. I'm not going to do that often, though. 😆

In some of the sports you mention as being risky - tennis, pickleball, basketball, ultimate, and soccer - I think a complicating factor is that they have characteristics like fast starts/stops and direction changes, so also have higher risk of orthopedic injuries. Such injuries can necessarily lead to bouts of rest for injury recovery, with detriments to training so deconditioning happens. It's anecdotal, but speaking as an on-water rower, more of my similar age friends (incuding rowers) seem to be injured playing pickleball lately more than anything else! (Maybe that's more a matter of pickleball being so popular.)

If we look at elite athletes and longevity, try to filter out the effects of inherently risky sports (that cause major physical trauma through things like impact), it looks like cardiovascular endurance athletes get the most longevity benefits. Cardiovascular endurance athletes spend a lot of time in zone 2, typically. But they also do some training - lesser amounts - in higher zones. VO2max, a measure of maximal oxygen uptake, seems to be a key metric related to longevity. In endurance athletes, one of higher intensity training's benefits is that it can increase VO2max.

I looked for a reasonable article about elite athletes' longevity: Some only look at a too-limited range of sports, but this one seems pretty good as an overview, plus gives its research sources (in the "Sources" drop-down at the end):

https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/which-athletes-live-longest.htm

Admittedly, elite athletes' training goals aren't focused on longevity, but as a group they do tend to have the best professional advice money can buy about sustaining their goals, which include things like health and career duration.

I don't really have an argument with that, but I'm also not interested in being THAT structured with my workout life these days. I'm too much of a hedonist. I just want to have fun. While doing that, I'm inherently going to get a mix of intensities, mostly lower intensity, more zone 3 than Attia or his disciples would say is good for me, and some zone 4, occasionally 5. (That's using HR for zones, which usualines up fairly well with RPE for me.) It's going to be in mixed workouts, not slavishly trying to keep some workouts only zone 2, and others specific interval work.

While I also understand that elite cardio athletes to use something near an 80/20 mix of low and high intensity, in my sport it's not commonly as strict as what he's doing, at least not as he describes it. There's a lot of low-intensity technical work, what people lly LSD, long slow distance, but it will not be at a consistent zone throughout the workout.

Genetically, I don't expect to live more than another 15-20 years anyway, and I'm more focused on enjoying those years - which includes staying as functional as possible for as long as possible. Because of that hedonistic streak - a wide one - my quality of life wouldn't be improved by tightly structuring my workouts.

I don't work out to work out. I don't specifically work out to live longer. I'm good with fun, general health, some performance improvements within the limitations of aging. If I use my limited discipline/willpower for anything, it would be to be more consistent with strength training, which I don't enjoy, but know is good for me.

My healthy forebears lived into their 80s. Some of them had better heal th habits in their youth and young adulthood than I did, realistically. I don't expect to outlive them, at least not by much.

One of the common critiques of Attia seems to be that he treats the middle of the evidentiary bell curve as if it applies to everyone. Arguably, it doesn't: Individuals vary from the mean, more in some ways that others. The rigidity of structure he's describing here like it falls in line with that critique. He's playing the odds, using research-based models in a very rigid way to do it. If that works for him, or if others want to follow that model, I'm cheering for them.

I'm skeptical that it's universally necessary to be that cookie-cutter about it, or even that there's a big incremental benefit from being that strict. He's the researcher, though, not me. 🤷‍♀️

I'm pretty sure dips down into zone 1 or up to zone 3/4 don't negate all benefits of the zone 2 that constitute most of the workout. That seems improbable. At most, maybe not maximize benefits.

The subsystems I'm familiar with, like the fuel utilization shifts from primarily fat for immediate fuel to primarily glycogen, are gradual, not like a light switch that flips from one setting to another in an instant. I believe Attia's an advocate of sports-lab testing for various physiological factors, something that's not necessarily available/affordable for all of us, so our zones are going to be more approximate in the first place.

If you want to use heart rate zones, it might make sense to consider testing to estimate actual max, once you have a good base of cardiovascular fitness, unless you've done such a test already. There are various self-tests or partner tests that can be done, and I think some fitness trackers may now have built-in tests. Not all of the DIY tests require going to actual max, some are submaximal. One of my rowing coaches tested our team's members a few years back; that's the HRmax value I still use. RPE suggests it's still close enough.

Absent a tested HRmax estimate, I think RPE is probable a better guide than the age estimates for a lot of people.

I have zero doubt that we affect our longevity via our choices about nutrition, activity, and some other life habits. There are limits, some of them genetic, some of them blind luck, some of them socio-economic, etc. So, all we can do is shift our odds.

This is speaking quite loosely, but I think the loose abstraction is generally correct: Most of the research studies that talk about correlations with longevity - even some causal factors beyond correlation - are looking at the very specific intervention that provides the highest average benefits for a particular intervention examined individually. (Intervention = diet, exercise mode, supplement, anything.) Individual instances fall along a bell curve, typically, because people vary. Sometimes the bell curve is wide and pretty flat (high standard deviation), sometimes tall and narrow (low standard deviation).

I think some people home in on that central tendency, and try to do all the things that create that biggest average bang for buck. That's what longevity hacking looks like, to me. The statistics feel a little squishy. How worthwhile is it? I don't know.

For one, that wouldn't create a happy life for me, in quality of life terms.

For two, in some people I feel like it's treating these things like there's some kind of magic spell, where if we get every single individual thing just right, we'll live a really long time, but if we are off on some tiny variable it won't work and we'll die younger. That seems unrealistic, not to mention a little desperate and obsessive.

For three, we don't know where we individually would fall on any relevant bell curve of population tendencies with respect to these variables. Probably near center, but that's a probability issue - a bet, in essence.

For four, I don't think the interactions between different interventions are well understood via research at this point. If I tune up my gut microbiome, does that positively affect every single other factor, or is it positive for some, negative for others? The analysis of confounders in studies is limiting, even in the best cases.

For five, I think a lot of this in practice is elitist: It costs a lot of money to longevity hack. How much incremental benefit comes from full-on hack, spending lots of time on specific exercise for longevity's sake, spending lots of money on supplements, getting all the physiologic/metabolic testing that's essential to really tune this stuff in, etc. . . . as compared with eating a generally healthy diet, getting some fun exercise that fits into good individual life balance, avoiding common risks like alcohol consumption, smoking, etc.?

When it comes to the elitism, I have to say . . . even though I don't personally think I have a soul . . . that if I have enough money and free time to maximize all those factors, maybe instead of some of it I should write a big check to the local food bank and volunteer to help struggling local 3rd graders learn to read, or something like that. Social connection and contribution are also seemingly factors in longevity, after all.

For six, Attia is a physician who makes a probably-huge income by promoting longevity hacking. Longevity hacking is his job. I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm actually glad people like him exist, and publish, and promote. He's not the only one, and longevity isn't the only similar issue - nutrition, exercise, various health issues have similar focused advocates. When it comes to how we as individuals should evaluate potential biases, and realistically how we should use the advice, that's a consideration, though.