Most walking advice centers on hitting a number, ten thousand steps, a certain distance, a daily total. Two studies using objective movement-tracking data suggest the number itself may be less important than something people rarely think to measure: whether that walking happens in one sustained stretch or gets chopped up into short, scattered bursts throughout the day.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2025 study by Borja del Pozo Cruz and colleagues, published in Annals of Internal Medicine. The researchers analyzed data from the UK Biobank, focusing specifically on 33,560 adults, with an average age of 62, who were classified as suboptimally active, averaging 8,000 steps a day or fewer. Participants wore wrist accelerometers for up to seven days, allowing researchers to see not just how many steps people took, but how those steps were distributed across bouts of continuous walking, and then tracked cardiovascular events and deaths over roughly eight years of follow-up. People whose steps mostly came in short bursts under five minutes had a cumulative cardiovascular event rate of about 13 percent, compared with roughly 4.4 percent among people whose steps mostly came in sustained bouts of 15 minutes or longer, a difference of roughly two-thirds. This difference held up independent of total daily step count, meaning two people walking the same overall distance could have very different cardiovascular outcomes depending on how that walking was structured throughout the day.
A second study helps confirm this pattern in a different population using an even more granular measurement approach. In a 2019 study by Amal Wanigatunga and colleagues, published in JAMA Network Open, the researchers drew on the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, following 548 adults age 65 and older who wore accelerometers that captured minute-by-minute activity data over a full week, then tracked mortality over roughly four years. Total daily physical activity, the overall amount of movement someone accumulated across the day, did not significantly predict mortality risk on its own. What did predict it was fragmentation, how broken up and scattered that activity was. Each 10 percent increase in activity fragmentation was associated with a 49 percent greater risk of death, and participants whose activity mostly occurred in bouts shorter than five minutes had higher mortality than those who sustained longer bouts.
Together, these two studies suggest that the structure of movement carries real, independent weight beyond the raw total. Del Pozo Cruz and colleagues’ research shows that among people who aren’t especially active to begin with, walking longer without stopping is linked to a dramatically lower risk of cardiovascular events than the same overall step count broken into short bursts. Wanigatunga and colleagues’ research shows a related pattern in older adults using even finer-grained tracking: total movement mattered less for mortality than how continuously that movement happened. Neither study is arguing that total activity doesn’t matter at all, but both point to something specific and actionable sitting underneath the usual step-count advice, the value of stringing movement together into longer, uninterrupted stretches rather than scattering it across the day in brief bursts.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Both studies are observational, tracking naturally occurring walking patterns and health outcomes rather than experimentally assigning people to walk in long versus short bouts, so while the associations are strong and consistent, they can’t fully rule out that people capable of sustaining longer walks are also healthier or more physically robust to begin with, in ways that independently predict better outcomes. Del Pozo Cruz and colleagues’ research focused specifically on adults who were already suboptimally active, so it’s not fully clear whether the same magnitude of benefit would show up in people who are already quite active. Wanigatunga and colleagues’ research involved a relatively modest sample of 548 older adults with 61 deaths recorded, a real but limited number of events to base strong conclusions on.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful reframe of what a “good” walk looks like. It isn’t only about the total distance covered over the course of a day. Stringing movement together into a longer, sustained stretch, rather than breaking it into scattered short bursts, appears to carry its own real, measurable value, independent of the total number ever reached.