Some myths never die. The idea of taking 10,000 steps a day is one of them. What started as a catchy marketing slogan has become a mantra for anyone promoting physical activity. But the 10,000-step target is arbitrary and ignores a fundamental truth of lifestyle medicine: When it comes to physical activity, anything is better than nothing.
It all began in 1965 when the Japanese company Yamasa Tokei began selling a new step-counter which they called manpo-kei (ten-thousand steps 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 was always somewhat arbitrary, but the idea of 10,000 steps cemented itself in the public consciousness from that point forward.
To be fair, there is nothing wrong with taking 10,000 steps a day and it does roughly correlate with the generally recommended amount of physical activity. Most people will take somewhere between5000 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 shorthand for people aspiring to achieve ideal levels of physical activity.
