Triage Q&A | Can I just keep increasing steps and lose more weight?

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The short answer

It is a fair question. If more steps mean more calories burned, can you simply keep stacking them on to lose more fat, or to eat more while you gain? Physiologically, yes. You can keep increasing your steps and you will keep burning more energy. But that does not make it a good idea past a certain point. For most people there is a level where extra steps stop being an easy, low-cost intervention and start causing problems. They either become impractical, or they start to eat into your recovery. So no, endlessly increasing steps is not a free lever you can pull forever.

Where steps fit in: non-exercise activity

Steps are part of what is called non-exercise activity thermogenesis. That is the energy you burn through movement that is not formal training. Over roughly the last twenty years, coaches and health professionals have become more aware that this kind of activity plays a relatively large role in how well you can regulate your body composition, and to an extent your health too.

The benefits are not only about calories. Walking is relatively low impact and it brings other things with it: better lymphatic drainage, cardiovascular adaptations, and support for bone density. So at a basic level, steps are good. They raise your energy expenditure in a gentle way that also lines up well with good health outcomes.

The 10,000 figure is a recommendation, not a rule

Most health organisations suggest somewhere around 10,000 steps a day. It is worth being honest about where that number came from. As best we can tell, it was created by a company that sold pedometers, so it is fairly arbitrary. That said, it does seem to correlate reasonably well with better health outcomes and, naturally enough, with better body composition.

Recently a lot of people, including some doctors, have been publishing pieces declaring that the 10,000 steps rule has been debunked. Our reaction to that is mild confusion. Did anyone genuinely think this was a hard rule? It was always just a generic, easy-to-remember recommendation. It is in the same category as five servings of fruit and vegetables a day, which was reportedly made up by a Californian growers association to sell more fruit rather than as a precise health prescription. More fruit and veg would probably be better, but if most people are not getting five, five is a sensible place to start. These figures are memes in the useful sense: simple targets that pass on easily and give people a starting point.

So aim for something around 10,000 if you need an anchor, but do not treat it as magic. If 10,000 were a true threshold, then 10,001 would somehow be fine and 9,999 would be a failure, which is obviously nonsense. There is also the height problem. The 10,000 steps of someone just under six foot six cover a longer distance, and burn more calories, than the 10,000 steps of someone five foot five. Should the shorter person do 15,000 to match? Are we equating for calories or for distance? The questions show why an exact number cannot be the point.

Using extra steps as a fat-loss or gaining tool

Some people genuinely struggle to push their steps much above 4,000 a day, and that is okay. The alternative is to eat fewer calories, and if that does not appeal, then increasing activity is the other route. Steps are one of the easiest ways to do that, which is why we are big fans of tracking them. It is a great intervention for keeping clients on track, whatever their goal.

From there a natural line of thinking appears, mostly during dieting but also during gaining phases. You may not want to drop calories any lower, you may not have time for cardio, or you may worry that hard cardio will hinder your gains or add too much fatigue. But you can usually find time to walk a bit more. So you nudge the target up. Someone comfortably hitting 10,000 might go to 15,000 to push a fat-loss phase along. That can be a perfectly good intervention, especially if it does not disrupt their life much and they already have an active job that keeps them on their feet.

The same logic applies in reverse for gaining. Some people deliberately walk more while gaining simply so they can eat more food. That is fine too, right up until it becomes impractical for the hours involved, or it starts to genuinely fatigue them.

Where it stops working

There comes a point where adding steps either costs you real energy and becomes fatiguing, or it just becomes impossible to fit in. If you have a desk job and suddenly need four hours of walking a day to hit your number, that is not practical. A personal trainer on their feet all day, running around the gym and taking classes, can rack up 30,000 steps without trying. It is tempting to assume everyone can do the same, but move that person to a sedentary job and they may struggle to clear 6,000.

The body also has to adapt. You cannot jump from 4,000 to 30,000 steps a day and expect to cope. Push too hard, too fast, and the wheels start to come off: overuse niggles in the metatarsals, ankles or knees. City breaks are a good illustration. Walking around London on a relatively sunny day, even with the tube, it is easy to clock 30,000 to 50,000 steps. Do it across a weekend and your calves are in bits, your feet feel swollen, and the blisters arrive. Doing that every single day would not be a sensible plan. Something similar happened on a trip to Rome: around 30,000 steps a day there tipped an already-irritated Achilles, aggravated from running, into a tendinopathy. That was a daft move, but it makes the point. At a high enough volume, walking stops being incidental movement and becomes exercise.

That is the core trade-off. Once walking is effectively training, you are using up local muscle glycogen, accumulating fatigue, and slowing your recovery, rather than getting the gentle, recovery-friendly effect that made steps attractive in the first place.

Walking helps recovery, until it does not

This is where you have to think in a non-linear way, because two true statements can sound contradictory. On one hand, being generally active across your day can help you recover from training. On the other, doing too many steps can harm your recovery. Both are correct. It depends on the dose.

Light, regular movement, simply not sitting all day, seems to aid recovery for a few plausible reasons. In the lower limbs, the way waste products are cleared upward relies heavily on muscle pumping: your calves contracting assist venous return, the flow of blood back to the heart, and they help pump the lymphatic system. (Yes, by that logic, having no calves to speak of is a minor health risk. Sorry.) Moving around also drives blood flow to an area, and blood has to be flowing for nutrients to reach the tissue and support recovery. There may also be a small, more acute benefit, with some glucose uptake into the muscle prompted by contraction. So it is reasonable to expect you will feel a bit looser and recover slightly better when you stay generally active. For someone quite unfit, there may even be small gains in fitness, and in an elderly person, possibly in muscle strength.

But every one of these benefits has a ceiling, beyond which it starts to compromise other processes. Use your legs hard for 30,000 steps and you are burning through stored fuel and adding to your fatigue, not reducing it. When you walk a lot while dieting, you may notice your legs feel a bit empty and fatigued after even an hour’s walk. At that point an hour’s walk is a fatiguing event in its own right. It has to be counted among the fatiguing events in your week, with recovery allocated to it accordingly.

It is also worth separating the walking itself from the rest of a day out. When you come home from a day in the city feeling wrecked, it is not only the shopping and the standing around. The steps themselves contribute to that fatigue, so it is easy to underestimate them.

Why pushing steps can backfire most for the keenest people

The people who tend to push steps too far are often the ones with the most to lose from it. Frequently they are in contest prep, trying to get very lean while holding on to as much muscle as possible. Stacking 20,000 steps a day on top of training, in a situation that is already catabolic, is not conducive to keeping the best leg development you can.

The same caution applies to athletes. Some of the GAA players we coach already accumulate a lot of activity, and the steps they take during training often are not even captured in their step count. When the goal is fat loss, there is no sense pushing them to 20,000 steps a day. They need their legs for their sport, and they may be training three to five times a week depending on whether they are playing for club, county or college. All of that movement, including manual labour for some people, belongs in the activity equation, even though none of it shows up as steps. So if you are training hard, two-a-days or otherwise, you cannot treat 10,000 tracked steps as the whole picture.

Are steps still worth tracking if you already exercise?

Yes. It remains a useful variable to keep an eye on across essentially the whole of life, whether you are training hard or not. Tracking it does not mean policing it religiously or chaining yourself to a single number. It simply stays relevant, and being active in addition to your formal training is a good idea, as long as you accept the trade-offs that appear at the top end.

The practical ceiling for most people

For most people, the point where extra steps stop being worth it sits somewhere around the 15,000 to 20,000 mark. That figure is not a recovery cut-off proven by evidence. It is a practical judgement. Once someone is reaching for 15,000 or more outside of an active job, that is usually most of their free time going on walking, time that is not spent training or on anything else. Past that, the choice becomes clear: either eat more to support the activity, or feel the effects in legs that are a bit depleted. Below it, in the 10,000 to 15,000 range, most people recover well and the steps stay non-fatiguing.

So once a client passes roughly 15,000 steps a day as a deliberate fat-loss tactic, and it is not simply their job that takes them there, we would generally rather have them eat slightly fewer calories than spend hours walking or, worse, lose their mind trying. There are exceptions. Coaches and others whose work genuinely keeps them at 30,000 steps over a four-day week are not asked to do less, because that would make them worse at their job. Instead we bring their calories up to support it. They can often diet on more food. Likewise, if you simply enjoy walking, listen to a lot of audiobooks and have the free time, then 20,000 steps a day is no problem at all, provided it is not crowding out other things or producing negative effects. It just would not be our default recommendation for most clients. In practice, fewer than half of these coaching clients sit in the 15,000 to 20,000 range or above, and when they do it is usually because they commute on foot by choice or work a very active job, like a personal trainer or a nurse covering a busy multi-floor hospital.

To put a real upper bound on it: you can absolutely go to 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 and beyond. An 11-hour hike in America once came to 60,000 steps. It burned plenty of calories and contributed to metabolism, but committing to an 11-hour hike just to hit a step count is hardly ideal if you also want to live your life.

Think in trends, not single days

A year of one of our own step counts, pulled from the Garmin app, came to 3,715,406 steps, which averages out to about 10,200 a day. The interesting part is the shape of the graph: it moves up and down month to month as life changes. There is no stress over an 8,000 day, or even a 6,000 day. On some days a cycle to college and a jiu-jitsu session in the evening do not register as steps at all, yet they are still activity and they still count.

That is the real message. Treat your step target as a weekly average, not a daily test you can fail. If you get stuck at work, have to drive to the gym and run out of time, 6,000 steps that day is absolutely fine. Like nutrition, step counts can quietly become another stressor if you fixate on hitting a number every single day. Focus on the trend over time, get the broad strokes right consistently, and do not sweat the day-to-day. That is what moves the needle in the long run.