How Many Steps a Day? The Quiet Science of Walking

In 1965, the Japanese company Yamasa Tokei Keiki brought the Manpo-kei pedometer to market — literally, the “10,000 steps meter.” The advertising slogan was: “Let’s walk 10,000 steps a day.” The product appeared 1 year after the Tokyo Olympic Games, at a time when interest in physical activity was especially high in Japan. The number was round and easy to remember, and the character 万, meaning 10,000, resembled the figure of a walking person.

At that time, there were no studies on 10,000 steps. It was an invented number in the sense that 10,000 sounds good and is easy to remember,

I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told Popular Science.

The slogan worked. Pedometers became popular, and the number took on a life of its own. From Japan, it travelled to the West, entered health guides, and later found its way into apps and fitness bands. For decades, it functioned as an unofficial recommendation, even though WHO guidelines and US health recommendations define activity mainly by duration and intensity. For adults, that means 150–300 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week, or 75–150 minutes of vigorous exercise.

How many steps a day really matter for health?

Only in recent years have scientists begun to systematically examine how many steps a day actually matter. In 2019, I-Min Lee’s team published the results of a study of more than 16,000 older women in JAMA Internal Medicine. Women who averaged around 4,400 steps a day had a lower risk of death than those who took around 2,700 steps. As the number of steps rose, the risk fell, but around 7,500 steps the curve began to flatten.

An even broader picture came from a 2025 meta-analysis by Melody Ding’s team at the University of Sydney, published in The Lancet Public Health. The researchers analyzed 57 studies covering more than 160,000 adults. Comparing 7,000 steps with a level of 2,000 steps produced clear results: a 47 percent lower risk of death from any cause, a 47 percent lower risk of death from cardiovascular causes, a 25 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease, a 38 percent lower risk of dementia, a 22 percent lower risk of depressive symptoms, and a 14 percent lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

7,000 steps may be a fairly accessible and achievable goal, offering health benefits relatively comparable to those associated with 10,000 steps,

Melody Ding emphasizes.

Health does not fit inside a single number

This does not mean that 10,000 steps is a bad goal. For more active people, it can be a reasonable measure of movement across the day. The problem begins when we treat it as the line between activity that matters and activity that supposedly gives us nothing.

The findings point instead to a gradual relationship. The greatest gain appears when people move away from very low levels of activity. In the 2025 meta-analysis, clear health benefits appeared when the average number of steps rose from around 2,000 to 5,000–7,000 a day. For many older people, the range of meaningful benefit lay around 6,000–8,000 steps. Among younger adults, the relationship may have continued up to 8,000–10,000 steps.

The answer to the question of how many steps a day are worth taking therefore does not fit inside a single number. 10,000 is neither a magical threshold nor a useless goal. It is a marketing symbol that later research placed near a range that brings benefits to many people — but not as the threshold at which the health benefits of movement begin.

Read this article in Polish: Mit 10 tysięcy kroków zaczął się od reklamy. Nauka rysuje inną granicę