Do you really need 10,000 steps a day to be healthy?

Before you snap on that Fitbit or Apple watch to keep track of your activity levels, a new study suggests you may not need to hit the magic number of 10,000 steps a day to stay fit after all.

Most people in the United States take on average 4,000 to 5,000 paces a day. But researchers at Harvard Medical School found that older women who took about 7,500 steps a day had the same mortality risk level as their counterparts in the study who walked the entire 10,000 steps.

The results were presented last week at the American College of Sports Medicine Annual Meeting and published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

There is no firm science behind the need to walk 10,000 steps per day. In fact, that exact number is reported to have originated with a Japanese pedometer company who used the figure for a 1965 marketing campaign.

So the Harvard researchers wanted to find out how just many steps a day is associated with a lower mortality risk.

Nearly 17,000 women with an average age of 72 years were asked to wear a research-grade pedometer during their waking hours for more than four years. (During that time, about 500 study participants died.)

The participants were part of the Women’s Health Study, originally created to study the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer among women taking low-dose aspirin and vitamin E.

The women who averaged about 4,400 steps per day were about 40 percent less likely to die during a four year follow-up period than the women who walked 2,700 steps.

One surprise for researchers was that the benefits of taking more steps seemed to level off at about 7,500 steps per day.

How fast or slow participants walked was not associated with a risk of death.

“Our study adds to a growing understanding of the importance of physical activity for health, clarifies the number of steps related to lower mortality and amplifies the message: Step more — even a little more is helpful.” said I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist in the division of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in a press release.

The participants were older, active, predominately white, women with a higher socioeconomic status. The study only looked at all causes of death and did not look at risks for cardiovascular disease, cancer or other causes. The authors could not separate cause from correlation — whether more steps lowered mortality or whether women who have better health took more steps.

The researchers believe more data on steps is needed. Step counts are easy for people to understand making recommendations for exercise in wellness programs, public health campaigns and advice from health practitioners simple. Plus, many people are already carrying a wearable device or phone that would track steps. And past exercise studies have found that monitoring steps provides more motivation to increase physical activity.

“We hope these findings provide encouragement for individuals for whom 10,000 steps a day may seem unattainable,” said Lee.