When Sonia Anderson got her first Fitbit step tracker, her poor pooch, Bronx, had no idea of all the steps that were coming.
The device—which counts every step Anderson takes and displays those steps on an app—was a Christmas gift from her daughters two years ago.
At the time, Bronx, a Yorkshire terrier, was younger and could still manage the additional walks up and down the trails along the sprawling apartment complex in Alexandria, Virginia, where Anderson lives. Anderson was on a mission to clock 10,000 steps a day.
More recently, as Bronx hit age 13, the dog started coming to dead stops during these long treks, as if to ask: What’s going on here?
Like many other folks 50 and older, the 63-year-old Anderson has been commandeered by the step-tracker craze that began about a decade ago, and her dog is an unwilling victim.
Anderson has bought into the $26 billion global step tracker industry and matches her daily count with her Fitbit-wearing friend, Landy Sorensen, 43. The two women have become inseparable Fitbit fanatics and competitors at the Arlington Food Assistance Center, where they amass additional steps every Friday morning while volunteering in the food bank. Now, they diligently count each other’s steps on their cellphone apps in real time—and compete to record just one more step than the other.
“My Fitbit made me a friend I’d have never had,” Anderson said.
It might also help her live longer, according to a recent Harvard University study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study concluded that among older women, as few as 4,400 steps per day helped to lower mortality rates.
With more steps per day, mortality rates decreased before leveling off at 7,500 steps, the study found.
In other words, the magic marketing number of 10,000 daily steps embraced by so many wearers of these devices—from Fitbits to Garmins to Samsungs to Apple Watches—may be about 2,500 steps more than necessary.
Truth be told, even the woman behind the study—who concedes that she, too, is enamored of her step tracker—can’t say how many steps are the right number for each walker.
“No one size fits all,” said I-Min Lee, an associate epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
But no matter how many steps you take, merely wearing and using a fitness tracker—particularly for older women, older men and other people who tend to be somewhat inactive—“can be beneficial not only to your health but to your quality of life,” Lee said.
