Monday, April 4, 2022

🏁 Axios Finish Line: Take a hike!

A fun history lesson | Monday, April 04, 2022
 
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Presented By Raytheon Technologies
 
Axios Finish Line
By Mike Allen, Erica Pandey and Jim VandeHei ·Apr 04, 2022
Apr 04, 2022

Welcome back. Join the conversation at FinishLine@axios.com with your candid thoughts and smart ideas.

  • Smart Brevity™ count: 394 words ... 1½ minutes.
 
 
1 big thing: Short walk to a long life
Illustration of a sneaker with a logo in the shape of a EKG line

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

 

Want to live longer? Take a hike — a shorter one than you've been told.

  • Stunning stat: Mortality risk was reduced by 50% for older adults who increased their daily steps from around 3,000 to around 7,000, according to new medical research.

Why it matters: 7,000 is the new 10,000, in terms of steps you should shoot for, The Lancet medical journal reports.

  • This is all it takes for those 60 and older to dramatically increase their lifespans.

Even for younger adults, the benefits of daily walking level off around 9,000 steps per day, not 10,000, the researchers found.

  • The risk reduction plateaued beyond that number.

The big picture: "Walking benefits nearly every cell in the body," says Amanda Paluch, a kinesiologist and public health expert at UMass Amherst and the lead author of the study.

  • It's wildly effective. Walking strengthens your heart, improves bone density, relaxes your mind, and helps with muscle-building and pain management.
  • Almost everyone can do it anywhere — your house, the office, outside. Start with 30 minutes and work your way up.

"It's not an all-or-nothing situation," says Paluch. Even boosting daily step count to 5,000, for those 60+ — and 7,000, for younger folks — slashed mortality risk by 40%.

  • Most of us can track steps with our phones. If you have a smartphone, you likely already have a health app that's counting them. If you want deeper insights, you can download a step-tracking app like this one.
  • And here are some simple and cheap pedometers, if that's your jam.

The bottom line: Most of us can add extra steps to our days with quick decisions — taking the stairs instead of the elevator ... or calling into a meeting on a walk.

  • Any step helps.

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A message from Raytheon Technologies

In aerospace and defense, data is driving everything
 
 

Companies like Raytheon Technologies are in a digital transformation — a golden age of data that's enabling:

  • Engineers to design faster.
  • Factory workers to build smarter.
  • Products to predict their own performance.

See how the company uses data to optimize every aspect of its operations.

 
 
📜 A fun history lesson

So if 10,000 steps isn't necessarily the magic number, where did it come from?

  • Turns out it was an old marketing campaign that went viral.

Ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a Japanese company came out with a pedometer and named it "manpo-kei," which roughly translates to 10,000-step meter, per BBC.

  • It's a nice round number. So the message stuck — and persists to this day.
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