Here's a question that's been quietly bugging me for years: does it actually matter if you walk fast, or is the whole point just to move? I've watched retreat guests obsess over their step counters between ceremonies, and I've watched other guests amble through the jungle at what can only be described as sloth-pace and finish the week looking radiant. Turns out the sloths might have been onto something.

A study published in JAMA followed nearly 5,000 adults over roughly a decade to figure out whether total daily steps or walking intensity did more to predict how long people lived. The findings are worth chewing on, especially if you're the kind of person who feels guilty every time your walk turns into a wander.

What the researchers actually did

The team pulled data from 4,840 American adults aged 40 and older who took part in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Between 2003 and 2006, participants wore a step-tracking device clipped to their hip during waking hours, for up to seven days. The device logged both total daily steps and how quickly people moved during their most active stretches of the day.

Nobody was told to walk more or walk faster. Researchers just watched what people did naturally and sorted them into groups based on their typical daily step counts — from under 4,000 steps a day up past 12,000. Then they followed the group for an average of 10.1 years and tracked mortality across that window.

That's the setup. Observational, decade-long, real-world behavior. It's the kind of study that can't prove causation, but it can spot patterns that are hard to ignore.

More steps, lower risk of dying

Participants averaged around 9,124 steps a day. Over the follow-up period, 1,165 people in the group died. When the researchers used 4,000 daily steps as their baseline for comparison, the numbers got interesting fast.

People hitting 8,000 steps a day had roughly half the risk of dying from any cause compared to those at 4,000. Push it to 12,000 steps and the risk dropped further still. The pattern held for deaths from heart disease and cancer specifically, and it held across men and women, younger and older adults, and several racial and ethnic groups. That kind of consistency is rare in nutrition and lifestyle research — usually a finding will show up in one subgroup and vanish in another.

So more steps, less dying. Fine. But what about speed?

The plot twist about walking speed

At first glance, pace looked like it mattered. People who moved faster during their most active periods had a lower death risk. It was the kind of finding that would normally end up as a headline: Brisk Walkers Live Longer.

Then the researchers controlled for total daily steps — meaning they asked, essentially, whether pace still mattered once you accounted for how much someone walked overall. And the association vanished. Poof. Gone. What actually predicted longevity wasn't how fast you moved. It was how much you moved.

This is a genuinely useful finding for anyone who's ever felt like their leisurely walk didn't count as "real" exercise. It did. It does. The accumulation is what your body is responding to, not the intensity of any single session.

Does this mean pace is irrelevant?

Not exactly. Brisk walking still raises your heart rate, still challenges your cardiovascular system, still delivers benefits that a slow stroll doesn't quite match. If you're training for something specific, or you're focused on heart health, pace has its place.

But here's the thing — you don't need to turn every walk into a workout. You don't need to strap on trainers and pump your arms every time you leave the house. A step to the mailbox counts. A slow walk with a friend counts. Pacing around the kitchen while you're on hold with your bank counts.

And the study doesn't argue that 12,000 steps should be everyone's target either. The relationship was continuous — more movement generally meant lower risk — but that doesn't mean 12,000 is the magic number. Adding movement to whatever your current baseline is seems to be more useful than chasing a specific figure your smartwatch decided was correct.

Practical ways to stack up more steps

You don't need a new fitness routine. You need to notice the pockets of your day where sitting has quietly won.

• Break up long stretches of sitting. Stand up every hour or so. Walk during phone calls. Take the stairs when you have the option. The point isn't to hit some arbitrary number of standing minutes — it's to keep your body from settling into a full day of stillness.
• Piggyback movement onto errands. Park at the far end of the lot. Walk to a coffee shop instead of driving. Add an extra loop when you take the dog out. Take a short walk after meals — there's separate research suggesting this helps with blood sugar regulation.
• Make walking social. A meandering walk with someone you like doesn't feel like exercise, but it stacks steps and tends to be sustainable in a way that treadmill sessions often aren't.
• Stop policing your pace. If you catch yourself slowing down mid-walk, don't sabotage the whole thing by declaring it a failure. Keep going. Slow steps still count.

The caveats worth remembering

This was an observational study. It found associations, not proof. People who walk more tend to have other habits that quietly support longevity — better sleep, more social contact, less chronic stress, fewer hours parked in a chair. Researchers can adjust for some of these things, but they can't adjust for all of them. It's possible that walking is partly a marker of a life that already has other things going for it.

Still, the biological story lines up. Regular movement supports circulation, insulin sensitivity, mood, sleep, and about a dozen other things that quietly shape how the next decade of your life is going to go. The mechanism isn't mysterious.

Why this matters if you're preparing for a retreat

If you're reading this while researching plant-medicine work or a psychedelic retreat, there's a reason movement keeps coming up in preparation guidance. Ceremonies ask a lot of the body. Facilitators routinely tell participants to build daily walks into the weeks leading up to a retreat — not to get "in shape" in some athletic sense, but because a body that moves regularly tends to metabolize experience, both chemical and emotional, more smoothly. The same is true afterward, during integration. Long walks after a ceremony are one of the oldest and most useful integration tools going.

You don't need to jog. You don't need to hit some app-approved step goal. You just need to accumulate honest, unglamorous movement across your days — the kind that doesn't feel like exercise but adds up anyway.

If any of this has you thinking about the broader arc of getting your body and mind ready for deeper work, a range of plant-medicine and psychedelic retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here. And in the meantime — go for a walk. Take your time.