A New Way to Understand Step Count
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If you wear a smartwatch, there’s a good chance you keep track of how many steps you take. Studies have shown that taking between 4,000 and 7,000 steps per day is associated with lower all-cause mortality. But researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Heart propose a new health metric: daily heart rate per step (DHRPS). This measure is calculated by taking your daily average heart rate and dividing it by your daily average steps.
The Study: To test this metric, researchers gave 7,000 participants Fitbits to wear on their wrists. Over the next five years, researchers tracked individual heart rates and step counts. They found that a higher DHRPS score was more strongly associated with diseases like type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart attack, and stroke than heart rate or step count alone.
The Takeaway: Check your averages and try the math yourself — Heart Rate/Steps = DHRPS. To see where you land, the study breaks results into three groups:
– Low: 0.0081 or lower
– Medium: between 0.0081 and 0.0147
– High: 0.0147 or higher
Keep in Mind: This study established a relationship between DHRPS, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases; it does not claim that a high DHRPS causes these outcomes.
