The Magic Number of 10,000

Everyone I know is concerned about health, living longer, but more important, living well. Eating right is an important factor in the process, but so is exercise, something most of us do not do plenty of.

It seems the easiest form of exercise is walking. It is something we all do, just not enough. Therefore, I tried to find out if my regular trips to the refrigerator were enough walking for a day, and it seems they are not.

The magic number of 10,000 steps per day is what everyone strives for. Many of us track our steps with smart watches, pedometers or phone apps, and are of course thrilled when we reach that all-important daily goal of 10,000 steps. For me the number is demoralizing.

I have always wondered who decided 10,000 steps is the magic number. I assumed it must have been years of research, by neuroscientists, who came up with this scientifically proven figure. Not so! The magic number ‘10,000’ dates back to a marketing campaign conducted shortly before the start of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. A company began selling a pedometer called the Manpo-kei . ‘Man’ means 10,000 and ‘po’ means meter. It was hugely successful, and the number seems to have stuck.

Let us look at this whole walking thing. Studies have compared the health benefits of 5,000 versus 10,000 steps, and, not surprisingly, the higher number is better. However, until recently, all the numbers in between had not been studied.

New research from a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and her team, focused on a group of more than 16,000 women in their seventies. Each woman spent a week wearing a device to measure movement during waking hours. Then the researchers waited.