Do You Really Need to Take 10,000 Steps a Day?

We are reg­u­lar­ly urged to take 10,000 steps a day. How­ev­er, it turns out 10,000 isn’t exact­ly a num­ber anchored in sci­ence. Rather, it’s a prod­uct of mar­ket­ing. Accord­ing to a Har­vard med­ical web­site, that fig­ure goes back to “1965, when a Japan­ese com­pa­ny made a device named Man­po-kei, which trans­lates to ’10,000 steps meter.’ ” 10,000 like­ly sound­ed bet­ter than a more pre­cise num­ber. And so it began.

So this rais­es the ques­tion: what’s the ide­al num­ber of steps accord­ing to sci­ence? Dr. I‑Min Lee, a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine at Har­vard Med­ical School, focused on that ques­tion and deter­mined that mor­tal­i­ty rates decline when women increase their steps from low­er lev­els (e.g., 2,000 steps) to 4,400 steps per day, with gains increas­ing until they reach 7,500 steps. From there, the gains lev­el out. (Read the JAMA study here.) Mean­while, a Euro­pean study, which mon­i­tored 226,000 par­tic­i­pants, found that peo­ple who walked more than 2,337 steps dai­ly could start low­er­ing their risk of dying from heart dis­ease. And peo­ple who walked more than 3,867 steps dai­ly could start reduc­ing their risk of dying from any cause over­all. How­ev­er, unlike the Har­vard study, the Euro­pean study found that adding more steps con­tin­ues to low­er mor­tal­i­ty rates, with gains accru­ing past 7,500 steps, and per­haps beyond 20,000 steps. What’s the exact sweet spot? We’ll need more research to fig­ure that out. Until then, the exist­ing research sug­gests that it pays to spend time with your walk­ing shoes.

The new video above come from TED-Ed.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

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