Daily Steps: Can You Reach 10,000?

The idea of taking 10,000 daily steps started as a catchy marketing slogan and has become a mantra for anyone promoting physical activity. But the 10,000 daily steps target is arbitrary and ignores a fundamental truth of lifestyle medicine, that is…

When it comes to physical activity, anything is better than nothing.

How did this all start?

It all began in 1965 when the Japanese company Yamasa Tokei began selling their new step-counter which they called manpo-kei (“ten-thousand step meter”). They coupled the product launch with an ad campaign — “Let’s walk 10,000 steps a day!” — in a bid to encourage physical activity.

The threshold seemed somewhat arbitrary, but the idea of 10,000 daily steps cemented itself in the public consciousness from that point forward.

In all honesty, there is really nothing wrong with taking 10,000 daily steps and it does roughly correlate with the generally recommended amount of physical activity. Most people will take somewhere between 5000 and 7500 steps a day even if they lead largely sedentary lives.

If you add 30 minutes of walking to your daily routine, that will account for an extra 3000-4000 steps and bring you close to that 10,000-step threshold. As such, setting a 10,000-step target is a potentially useful for people aspiring to achieve ideal levels of physical activity.

Does Walking Fewer Daily Steps Have any Benefit?

Yes, it does. A study in JAMA Network Open followed 2110 adults from the CARDIA study and found rather unsurprisingly that those with more steps per day had lower rates of all-cause mortality. Interestingly, those who averaged 7000-10,000 steps per day did just as well as those who walked more than 10,000 steps. This suggests that the lower threshold was probably the sweet spot.

Other research has shown that improving your step count is probably more important than achieving any specific threshold. In one Canadian study, patients with diabetes were randomized to usual care or to an exercise prescription from their physicians. The intervention group improved their daily step count from around 5000 steps per day to about 6200 steps per day. While the increase was less than the researchers had hoped for, it still resulted in improvements in blood sugar control. In another study, a 24-week walking program reduced blood pressure by 11 points in postmenopausal women, even though their increased daily step counts fell shy of the 10,000 goal at about 9000 steps.

The reality is that walking 10,000 steps a day is a worthy goal for most and is almost certainly beneficial, but there is also concern for some people (chronic illness, severe diabetics, older people with sedentary lifestyles) “jumping” abruptly to 10,000 steps per day as that may have a detrimental health effect.

But even lower levels of physical activity have benefits as well. The trick is not so much to aim for some theoretical ideal but to improve upon your current baseline.

I usually encourage my relatively sedentary patients to get into the habit of taking daily walks (be it in the morning, during lunchtime, or in the evening). This will pay dividends regardless of their daily step count.

The point is that when it comes to physical activity, the greatest benefit seems to be when we go from doing nothing to doing something.