A 70 year old woman should walk at least as many as 6,000 steps to 8,000 steps a day, for optimal health benefits.
Walking as many as 6,000 steps to 8,000 steps a day at 70 or other ages helps reduce your risk of heart disease, improves your heart health, reduces risk of stroke and reduces risk of early death.
Benefits of walking also increase even with smaller increments like with 500 extra steps.
10,000 steps s a common goal for 70 year old's and older adults, although the benefits haven been shown to plateau for seniors in the 6,000 to 9,000 step range.
To remain active and healthy you should focus on consistency with your walking and find a comfortable and achievable walking pace, and start lower around 4,500 steps a day and then gradually increase the walks.
Even walking around in a mall, store or in the house counts towards those steps.
When it comes to optimal health it's better to walk both faster and longer.
Walking faster is also strongly linked more to reduced mortality risk and more improved health and longer walks also build your endurance and can also be more sustainable.
The ideal approach to walking for health benefits is to actually combine both walking faster for a portion of your walk and then continue walking for a longer distance.
The more you walk, the healthier you can become and you can also lose weight by walking longer and even faster and can help to maintain a healthy weight.
Walking a faster pace is associated with a lower risk of death from all causes, especially from cardiovascular disease as it helps keep your heart healthy and helps improve blood flow.
Brisk walking and walking fast also improves your heart's efficiency and increases oxygen delivery to your heart and the rest of your body and helps to reduce cardiovascular issues.
For older adults, increasing your walking speed and walking as fast as you can, can also lead to substantial improves in your overall ability to walk longer distances.
Longer walks also help to build up your overall endurance over time.
And slower, longer walks also put less strain on your body, when compared to fast walking, which can also potentially lower your risk of injury.
Longer walks can also be good as they can also provide you more time for a mental time out and can also improve your emotional well being.
To combine both walking fast and longer walks, start out with a brisk walking pace to get your heart rate up, as this also provides the most significant health benefits.
Then add longer distance at a moderate pace.
After the fast paced portion of your walk, continue walking for longer distances at a slower or even more moderate pace to meet your step goals and help build your endurance.