Walking To Succeed

Not 10,000 steps. The real number - and a straight-talking way to get there.

Almost every walking book for people over 60 repeats the same borrowed number: 10,000 steps a day. Here is what most of them do not tell you - that figure came from a 1965 Japanese pedometer advertisement, not a single clinical trial. Walking To Succeed tells you the real, evidence-matched target for most adults over 60 instead: roughly 6,000-8,000 steps a day, drawn directly from a 2022 meta-analysis of 15 international cohort studies in The Lancet Public Health.

This is a walking book that treats you as someone who can handle the truth, not just the encouragement. It tells you plainly what walking does support - cardiovascular health, mood, a real (though associational) link to lower dementia risk - and what it does not: walking on its own is not an established way to reduce your risk of falls. That claim belongs to combined balance and strength training, the subject of this series' first title, Balance First, and this book says so honestly rather than borrowing a claim it cannot back up.

What's inside

• The real steps-a-day number for your age group, and the true story behind 10,000
• A genuine twelve-week progression, built from wherever you are actually starting
• How to judge your own effort without a heart-rate monitor - essential if you take blood pressure or heart medication
• Hills, uneven ground and walking poles, covered honestly with real evidence, not hype
• A full safety section: winter ice, dark evenings, heat, vision and hearing, walking alone
• The social walk: parkrun, Slí na Sláinte, Ramblers, walking football and walking netball - all checked current as of this writing
• Every claim graded - well established, preliminary, or honestly not established - so you always know how much weight to put on it

Written by the To Succeed Coaching Team, the authors of Balance First and more than ninety other practical guides. Find the full series at tosucceed.coach.