Joy Kong, MDRegenerative Medicine Physician, Educator, and Entrepreneur

Why Simply Moving More Drastically Cuts Mortality Risk

30 May 2025 · 1 min

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Joy Kong, MD, explains how moving from 2,000 to 8,700 daily steps cuts all-cause mortality risk by roughly 60%. Going further to 16,000 steps adds only 5% more benefit. The biggest gain comes from breaking sedentary habits, not from extreme activity.

Questions this video answers

Going from ~2,000 steps to ~8,700 steps per day (about 1.5 hours of walking spread through the day) is stated to yield a 60% reduction in all-cause mortality.

Increasing to ~16,000 steps per day is reported to provide an additional ~5% reduction in mortality risk beyond the benefit at ~8,700 steps.

Chapters

What do you think will be the most effective way for people to stay in good shape, gain muscle, you know, have good body composition? What would be your advice?
What they find in the studies is that you know going from sedentary to just some physical activity provides the greatest risk reduction. So even like walking going from 2000 steps to 8700 steps which is maybe like an hour and a half of walking throughout the entire day that yields a 60% risk reduction in all cause mortality. So just going from being sedentary to being semi active and not being like even like an athlete that gives you a massive benefit for reducing the risk of a lot of chronic diseases as well as all cause mortality. If you go beyond that you go to 16,000 steps per day you do gain like a small benefit, you gain an additional 5% risk reduction. But as you can see like the majority of benefits come from just getting off the couch and being somewhat active.