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Is the 10,000-steps goal more myth than science? Study seeks fitness truths

Much of what we know about exercise remains a guess, based mostly on experiments from lab treadmills or ideas from often unreliable details recorded in people's diaries and logbooks.

Take the number 10,000, which has come to represent the point at which exercise becomes enough to keep us healthy. According to public-education campaigns, social media and your Fitbit, if you walk or run 10,000 steps a day - about five miles, depending on your stride - you're all good. Look at the science behind this idea, however, and you'll find no magic digits.

Weirdly enough, that goal originated with the manpo-kei, a type of pedometer sold in Japan in the 1960s that literally translates to “10,000-steps meter.” The mark then took on a life of its own as researchers began to use it as a baseline in their experiments.

At Stanford, an interdisciplinary team is now launching all manner of experiments to figure out how much the quantitative and qualitative goals we've come to accept as truth are grounded in real science.

Its experiments have volunteers donning various consumer-grade fitness bands, heart-rate monitors and pulse trackers, putting on oxygen masks and then playing basketball - so researchers can learn what happens to our bodies and how well the technology is tracking those changes. They are brainstorming other big ideas, too - studying activity patterns in diverse regions of the world by giving these devices to rural Africans, for example, and creating an app to provide early warning of a heart attack and then dial 911.

Stanford cardiologist Alan Yeung has embarked on what may be the most audacious study of exercise in history.

Using an app on those ubiquitous gadgets that many of us carry around 24/7 - our smartphones, fitness watches and other electronic devices - Yeung and his colleagues are mapping the second-by-second minutiae of how we move. Not just the count of our steps, but all sorts of measures, including our velocity and orientation in space.

Just a year in, the results already are provocative.

Researchers are using data from personal fitness tracking devices to learn more about how much and what kind of exercise is needed to stay healthy. Courtesy of Fitbit

For starters, America's couch-potato lifestyle may be worse than anyone thought. Not only are many of us not exercising, the early data also show that a huge percentage of us are barely moving. The finding applies even to people in their 20s through 40s, supposedly the prime of life.

"This was a surprise,” Yeung said. “A lot of people are spending most of their time sitting around - not even standing, not even going up and down.”

The study is one of a number of potentially paradigm-shifting initiatives made possible by the gazillion data points amassed by our smart devices. Stanford's app - which participants download voluntarily - is part of the first generation of projects powered by Apple's ResearchKit, a set of free tools introduced by the company in early 2015 to great fanfare and a fair amount of skepticism.

More than 100,000 people signed up in just the first six months, generating so much information that most of the researchers involved have been able to analyze only a tiny fraction of it.

Stanford's project uses a smartphone's accelerometer (a sensor that measures movement and velocity) and gyroscope (which measures angular rotation across three axes) to analyze how we move. The researchers' goal is to figure out how we can change our movements to improve heart health and live longer.

Eventually, they hope to answer such questions as: Does a person need to exercise daily, or is it OK to be a weekend warrior? Are brief, high-intensity workouts just a fad, or do they actually work?

“We know exercise saves lives,” explains project co-director Euan Ashley, head of Stanford's biomedical data science initiative. “What we don't know is what is the right dose.”

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