Should You Track Your Exercise In Steps Or Minutes?

Many people use fitness watches to track their workouts and overall fitness—but is it better to measure your movement in steps or overall minutes of exercise? New research may have the answer.

The findings indicate that what's most important is simply sticking with an exercise routine, rather than tracking movement in one specific way over another, experts said.

Currently, exercise guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services recommend adults get either 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) or 75 minutes of vigorous activity weekly to achieve optimal health benefits.

But this research implies that tracking steps—which has become increasingly popular given the ubiquity of fitness trackers and smartphones—is also a useful metric.

"We recognized a gap in the existing guidelines that focus primarily on moderate-to-vigorous physical activity but lack a clear step-based recommendation," Hamaya told Health. "Our study aimed to explore whether step counts could be as effective as MVPA time in predicting health outcomes."

To compare these two methods of fitness tracking, Hamaya and his team used data from 14,399 people enrolled in the U.S. Women's Health Study, which was a randomized clinical trial that ran from 1992 to 2004.

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