Why 10,000 Steps a Day is Bullshit

10,000 steps daily should be healthy. This assessment is based on an advertisement! You should really walk that many steps a day.

Fitness wristbands have been the trend for years – and whenever the wearer has walked 10,000 steps a day, his wristband draws his attention to this with a special display and congratulates him cheerfully. But how did this ambitious 10.00 steps rule come about? The blame lies with an advertisement that is over 50 years old, as Spiegel Online reports.

In the beginning was advertising

Yamasa launched the first portable pedometer in 1964, because the Olympic Games in Japan had created a real movement hype at the time. The device was called “Manpokei”, which means something like “The 10,000 Pedometer”. Consequently, the company promoted the pedometer by claiming that the 10,000 steps per day were healthy. Yamasa never proved this claim in a study.

And here it gets curious: without further serious checks the faith prevailed and was even adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO). But this could soon change, because in the meantime some studies have been conducted which suggest that 10,000 steps a day is excessive. According to these studies, you could do a lot of good for your health with just a few steps a day.

Is 7,500 steps enough?

A new study by Harvard Medical School just appeared in the journal Jama Internal Medicine, in which the researchers compared the number of daily steps with the risk of death. The data were collected from 16,000 US citizens with an average age of 72 years. The study concluded that women who walked at least 4,400 steps a day had a lower risk of dying after four years than women who walked 2,700 steps a day. This so-called statistical advantage increased up to a limit of 7,500 steps per day. Those who walked even more did not have an even higher life expectancy.

However, there is a catch to the study: it is not quite clear whether the women in the second group only moved less because they were already ill. Although they all said that a daily walk was feasible for them, they did not say how far they could actually walk.

Unclear study situation

So far there is no clear conclusion as to how many steps per day are really useful. However, several study results suggest that the 7,500 steps from the new study are not entirely up to scratch – the range according to these studies is 6,000 to 8,000 daily steps, which are said to have a positive effect on cardiovascular health. But there are other studies that even recommend a daily step range of 15,000 to 18,000.

For the moment, at least, it can be said that no one needs to go crazy if they “only” manage a scant 6,000 steps a day. In any case, the pure number of steps says nothing about how intensive the movement actually is: for example, the effect of a long walk is different from that achieved by 30 minutes of jogging – even if the number of steps is the same for both. So the rule of thumb is: You can confidently push away the frustration about the missed 10,000 steps and instead enjoy small successes 🙋🏻♀