I was out doing yard work this week and got thinking about activity level.
There are a few different kinds. There’s strength training, which is my favorite. There’s cardio. And then there’s everything else you do on your feet in a day, which has its own name – NEAT, for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. It’s the walking, the standing, the carrying, the stairs, the fidgeting. If we track it at all, most of us track it with a step counter.
NEAT is its own category, and it behaves differently from the training you schedule. That difference is the whole point of this post.
Most exercise has a sweet spot
When researchers look at how much of something is optimal – how much cardio, how much lifting – what usually turns up is a U-shaped curve. As you do more, your risk of dying early comes down. It keeps coming down until you reach a sweet spot. And then, if you keep piling more on, it can start to creep back up.
We see this in cardiovascular training. Many, many hours a week of hard endurance work is a lot of stress for a body to absorb. We see something similar with strength training – one large review of the research found the lowest mortality risk at roughly 30 to 60 minutes a week of muscle-strengthening work, with the association weakening as weekly volume climbed well past that. In my own practice, two to four days a week is where most clients do best over the long haul.
I like more than that. It’s my favorite thing to do. But I’m not going to tell you that’s the health-optimal dose, because it isn’t.
NEAT is the exception
General daily activity doesn’t behave that way. Within the limits of a normal life – you do have to sleep, you do have to sit down sometimes – more is better, and it doesn’t turn around on you.
The reason is dose. Walking around is very low intensity, so it puts minimal stress on your body. It’s not something you have to recover from, unless it’s a sudden jump way beyond what you’re used to. Your body can absorb an enormous amount of it.
Where the 10,000 number came from
Not from a study. The 10,000-step target traces back to a Japanese pedometer sold in 1965 called the manpo-kei – literally, “10,000-step meter.” It was a nice round number in a marketing campaign, and it stuck.
The research points somewhere lower. A systematic review published in The Lancet Public Health in July 2025 pooled 57 studies covering more than 160,000 adults, and compared with a fairly sedentary 2,000 steps a day, hitting around 7,000 steps was associated with:
- 47% lower all-cause mortality
- 38% lower risk of dementia
- 28% fewer falls
- 25% lower risk of cardiovascular disease
- 22% lower risk of depression
- 14% lower risk of type 2 diabetes
A couple of honest caveats, because these numbers get passed around without them. The authors themselves flag the cancer and dementia findings as low-certainty – not many studies, and not all of them adjusted for things like age and frailty. And this is observational research, so people who walk a lot differ from people who don’t in plenty of ways besides walking. The direction is well supported. The exact percentages, I’d hold loosely.
Also worth knowing: even about 4,000 steps looked meaningfully better than 2,000. If you’re starting from very little, the first chunk is where most of the return lives.
What happens past 7,000
Here’s the part I think matters most. Past 7,000, cardiovascular benefits kept improving, and most of the other outcomes leveled off rather than reversing.
That’s the structural difference between NEAT and hard training. With hard training, too much has a real cost. With general daily movement, the worst case is diminishing returns – each additional bit does a little less for you than the last. That’s not a reason to stop. You still want to be moving all the time.
Which is why I was thinking about the garden
One of the wonderful things about keeping a garden is that there is always something to do. You can prune, you can chop, you can mow, you can rake, you can weed, you can water and water and water and water and water.
Those are all just wonderful NEAT opportunities. And if gardening isn’t your thing, housework does the same job. There’s no shortage of things in the world that need doing.
A client and I were talking about an old saying recently – what’s up, Ryan – and it’s this: haul water, chop wood. (You’ll usually see it the other way round, “chop wood, carry water,” and it’s generally traced to Zen Buddhism, though nobody seems able to pin down the source.) Do the simple things. Do them over and over. It takes care of itself.
The part nobody talks about: sleep
Our bodies are built to benefit from being on our feet. You don’t need to be training hard all the time – do that in doses that are appropriate. The rest of the time, keep moving, keep going, stay busy.
When your hands are busy and your feet are moving, your mind is free to think. You’ll notice you’re less stressed and happier. And you want that feeling at the end of the day – the one where you’ve been up and busy since morning and you cannot wait to climb into bed, shut off the light, and completely lose yourself to sleep. It’s a wonderful feeling and I think it’s completely underrated.
What most of us actually feel at the end of the night is wired. We haven’t moved enough and we’ve used our minds too much, and it’s hard to sleep. So you sleep poorly, you wake up exhausted, you start the morning tired, and you end the day wired again.
We want the opposite. On your feet all day – moving, lifting, carrying, bending. Then into bed completely exhausted, and up in the morning refreshed after a deep night’s sleep.
We talk about sleep all the time and how important it is. This is the missing piece of it. A lot of daily activity that isn’t intense, doesn’t tax your mind, doesn’t strain your body – you just keep going and keep going and keep going. Everything benefits from that.
It really is that simple. And I need to work on it as much as anyone else, so consider this a reminder for me as much as for you.
Haul water, chop wood. Do the simple stuff, and repeat.
