Moira Club Members, Averaging Age 86, Outwalk Every Published Study in Five-Week Walking Pilot

Moira Club, a concierge health and wellness membership built for adults thriving at home, today announced results from its Fourteener Step Challenge, a five-week pilot in which eleven members — averaging 86 years old, with a range of 70 to 98 — increased their average daily steps by 27%, from 4,380 to 4,981. The gain outperformed every comparable walking intervention identified in the published literature, including studies of populations a decade or two younger.

Each participant wore a wearable device and received consistent, human-guided coaching from Moira’s Vitality Team, tracking a gamified, virtual ascent of Colorado fourteeners. The results confirm what Moira was built on: sustained behavior change later in life isn’t driven by the device on a member’s body — it’s driven by the team walking alongside them.

The cohort added 601 steps per day on average. Applying the American Heart Association’s 2023 finding that every additional 500 daily steps is linked to a 14% lower cardiovascular risk in adults 70 and older, that gain projects to roughly a 17% lower cardiac risk per member — a real clinical signal, not just a number on a chart. And members were already outperforming their peers before the challenge even began: their pre-challenge baseline placed most of them in the “above average” quintile for their age group.

“Nobody told our members in their 80s and 90s they were too old to get stronger — so they didn’t believe it, and they outwalked people half their age. That’s the whole company in one sentence. We didn’t start Moira to manage decline. We started it to prove decline isn’t inevitable — that the body’s capacity for change doesn’t expire, no matter what year you were born.” — Kevin Riddleberger, Co-Founder and CEO, Moira Club

A Human-Guided Model, Built to Outperform

Pedometer- and app-only interventions in the published literature produced gains as low as 3.7% — roughly a seventh of what Moira’s coached cohort achieved. The nearest comparable assisted-living study managed just 6.5%, about a quarter of Moira’s result. Moira’s member-relative scoring model means every gain counts on its own terms — a 98-year-old member’s 26% improvement weighed the same as anyone else’s, because the goal was never to chase a population average. It was to meet each member where they are and help them move further than they thought possible.

“Independence isn’t something we protect by keeping people still — it’s something we earn back by helping them move. Every member in this cohort had already been told, in some quiet way, to slow down. They didn’t listen. Neither did we.”