Should I count steps or time how long I exercise? Both work. Be active any way that suits

• A new study shows getting in a minimum recommended step count each day is as good for health as meeting physical activity time targets

How do you monitor your physical activity level? Do you count steps? Do you track the minutes you have spent in the gym? Do you monitor your heart rate?

Perhaps you do not register your exercise - or you do not do any at all.

While there are many devices and apps that count steps, keep time, log our rising and falling heart rates and more, new research suggests that it may not matter how we measure it - just that we exercise regularly.

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Rikuta Hamaya, a researcher in preventive medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in the US state of Massachusetts, recently led a study to settle a contemporary argument: should we be counting our exercise in step numbers, or in blocks of time - as advocated by the World Health Organization (WHO)?

The WHO recommends that adults do at least 150 minutes weekly - or half an hour, five days a week - of moderate to vigorous physical activity.

That might be brisk walking, during which your heart rate should stay at about 110 to 120 beats a minute. If your activity is more vigorous - like jogging, for example, 75 minutes a week will suffice.

One in four adults globally do not meet this requirement. It is worse in Hong Kong; a study last year found that 53 per cent of city residents do not put in that much time.

Hamaya said his team recognised a gap in the existing physical activity guidelines.

They aimed to explore whether step counts could be as effective as time spent exercising in predicting health outcomes, specifically in an older female population.

There has been a spotlight on steps for some time now. The first pedometer - a rather clunky piece of apparatus worn on a person's belt to track the number of steps taken - was developed in Japan.

The Manpo-kei, or "10,000-step meter", hit the market in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, with a campaign to encourage people to take 10,000 steps a day for good health.

Since then, there have been many advances in step tracking, including apps for personal digital assistants and then smartphones, and the introduction of Fitbit and other fitness-monitoring wearable devices.

"With more people using smartwatches to measure their steps and overall health, we saw the importance of ascertaining how step-based measurements compare to time-based targets in their association with health outcomes - is one better than the other?" Hamaya said.

In the study he led, researchers analysed data from an ongoing follow-up study of surviving participants of the Women's Health Study, a landmark trial that began in 1993 and ended in 2004.

For the four years between 2011 and 2015, over 14,000 women aged 62 and older were asked to wear an Actigraph accelerometer on their hip for seven consecutive days, removing it only while sleeping, swimming or bathing.

It measured their time spent in moderate to vigorous physical activity, and their step counts. Researchers examined the associations between each of these measures and all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease.

If steps and time are equally good measures, how many steps equate to the prescribed 30 minutes a day if you are a regular walker?

To count towards your daily recommendation, those steps need to be brisk. A brisk walk comes in at around 100 to 120 steps a minute (you can talk but you should not be able to sing the words of a song) which means in 30 minutes at that pace, you could take a little over 3,000 steps.

Taking 10,000 steps a day is good for one's health, certainly, but is more than what is necessary to improve it from a standing start.

One study, for example, found that taking 3,800 steps per day at speed (that is about 30 minutes at 120 or 130 steps a minute) produced measurable benefits associated with a 25 per cent lower incidence of dementia.

Another study - similar to Hamaya's in that it relied on data from older women - found around 4,400 steps to be significant for improved health.

Benefits rose up to around 7,500 steps, and then plateaued. "More steps taken per day are associated with lower mortality rates until around 7,500 steps a day," the study findings said.

Research suggests that wearing a fitness tracker is linked to a higher step count - it seems to motivate the wearer to outwalk family members or friends, or even themselves to better the number of steps taken the day before.

A study published in the British Medical Journal found that on average, wearing a tracker encouraged people to take an extra 1,235 steps per day and, in so doing, achieve nearly 50 extra minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week.

A decade ago, the UK's specialist health university, St George's in London, ran a trial and produced a pamphlet to encourage people to build up their walking speed and distances. The Pace Up 12-week programme is still relevant and helping to motivate people to walk faster and longer 10 years on.

Hamaya, who is 35 and uses a Fitbit to measure both his steps and time spent exercising, says the key takeaway is that you can boost your health by following time guidelines for moderate to vigorous physical activity or meeting a recommended daily step count.

"People should aim to be active in ways that fit their lifestyle and preferences, whether that's structured exercise or simply walking more throughout the day."

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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.

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