Daylight saving time is thought to promote more outdoor activity by giving people an extra hour of sunshine in the evening prior to dusk.
But a new study says that’s just not so. The new study was published on April 23. There’s no appreciable difference in people’s number of daily steps before and after a time change, according to Fitbit data drawn from 1,157 people in four U.S. states.
For the study, researchers drew on data from the All of Us Research Program, a federally funded initiative that gathers Fitbit data from more than 50,000 people across the country every year.
This group chose to analyze the four corner states, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, since the majority of Arizona does not synchronize its clocks with the rest of the nation.
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The states are big but do not vary greatly from each other in terms of affecting their citizens’ activity levels, according to the researchers. The group could then analyze Arizona in comparison to the other three states.
According to the UT Southwestern Medical Center, this study focused on one week before and one week following the periods in which the time shifts occurred between autumn 2021 and spring 2023.
The findings were that individuals took a similar amount of daily steps regardless of the time period.
However, the time shift had an impact on the timing of the steps people took, scientists noted.
When it was time for Daylight Saving Time, individuals walked more in the evenings, but they walked fewer steps early in the day, while the opposite was true for Standard Time.
For instance, when it came to the fall period, walking steps during the morning rose by approximately 202, or about 1.5 blocks’ worth of walking steps, and in the evening fell by 180 steps.
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