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February 11, 2022

Why the 10,000 steps a day challenge is a myth

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: — admin @ 5:02 am

If you asked 100 people on the street “What’s the correct number of steps to take every day?”, odds are good that most of them would tell you the same number: 10,000.

10,000 steps per day has long been hailed as the magic number to notch up on your pedometer — but there’s no scientific basis to this target.

Where did the 10,000 steps myth come from?

10,000 steps a day totals up to about 8km, or about 100 minutes of walking time.

The “10,000” number traces back more than 50 years, to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. That event kicked off a Japanese fitness craze which produced a popular pedometer called the manpo-kei — which translates to “10,000 steps meter”. It’s thought that step target was plucked out of the air because the Japanese character for 10,000 kind of looks like a person walking. (See if you can spot the resemblance.)

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Man using daily activity tracking app on mobile phone.
(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

So 10,000 is more good marketing than good science.

To be clear: there is nothing bad or wrong about 10,000 steps. If you’ve been trying to walk 10,000 steps a day, keep doing that! It’s an excellent target. But to those who aren’t very active, 10,000 can seem like a dauntingly high number that can put people off walking altogether — and therefore miss out on its vital health benefits (which include improved cardiovascular fitness, mental health, and blood pressure).

So how many steps should I aim for?

About 7500.

A lot of actual scientific research has arrived at that number. One of the most recent studies was published in the Journal of Internal Medicine in November 2021, in which investigators conducted a meta-analysis (a study of other studies) which determined that the health benefits of added steps plateau after you hit 7500 steps.

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Female runner taking a break from running workout and reviewing info on her smart watch.
(Getty)

If 7500 still sounds a li’l steep, take assurance that any amount of steps is better than none. A 2019 study in JAMA Internal Medicine determined that older women who took 4400 steps per day decreased their risk of early death by about 40 percent compared to women who managed only 2700 steps per day.

Not just how far you walk, but how fast

Another problem with 10,000 steps for day is that it doesn’t account for pace. You could take all those steps at a lower intensity, which won’t deliver the health benefits as powerful as activity done at a medium or high intensity.

Science has a solution for that, too.

A long-running US trial has determined that 100 steps a minute for 30 minutes a day is a pace that’s brisk enough to deliver maximum health benefits, while also being achievable for most of the population.

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And, unlike 10,000 steps, which requires a fitness tracker or smartphone to keep track (unless you’re very good at counting), 100 steps a minute just requires some basic arithmetic. “Simply count the number of steps accumulated in one minute, or in 15 seconds multiplied by four,” researcher Elroy Aguiar told 9Honey Coach.

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