Do you need to walk 10,000 steps a day to be healthy?
The benefit of steps is in the dose.
“Get 10,000 steps a day” is go-to advice commonly dished-out in the fitness community and to anyone looking to better their health or lose a bit of weight.
It’s fairly well placed advice, since walking is generally a safe and accessible form of movement for most1. The World Health Organisation (WHO) emphasises increases in physical activity, and decreases in sedentary behaviours, as part of guidelines to living a healthier life2.
Why 10,000 steps per day?
Where does this arbitrary but beautifully rounded number come from? Spoiler, it isn’t an evidence-based benchmark.
You may be surprised to hear that it comes from a 1964 Tokyo Olympics marketing slogan, “Healthcare with 10,000 steps/day”3, by Yamax (formerly Yamasa Tokei Keiki Co., Ltd) who were tasked with producing a 10,000 step pedometer, as a solution to help increase physical activity levels of the citizens of Tokyo.
The problem with 10,000 steps
The problem with 10,000 steps is in how we frame it, whereby people’s attempts at increasing their activity levels can be disrupted by all-or-nothing thinking. I’ve seen this in the clients I work with. At best, they end up overdelivering on steps, at worst they do pretty much none. And what’s often forgotten, is the huge grey area in between 0 and 10,000.
All or nothing thinking is a common cognitive distortion (an automatic and unrealistic error in thought). Cognitive distortions are held by everyone. They’re understood to be an evolutionary mechanism and thought to be present in order to bypass much slower and logical thinking when we are under immediate threat 45… they essentially help us make automatic decisions.
That doesn’t mean we can’t step back and challenge this thinking error in a more logical way. Let’s look at the facts about the grey area in between 0-10,000 steps!
The benefit is in the dose
Liu et al., 20226 review the impact of a range of steps on death by all causes. Basically, how many steps do you need to do to reduce the risk of dying (it sounds morbid but it’s actually very good news).
In the above chart (exceptional annotations from me), the further up the vertical axis we go, the higher the risk of dying from all causes, whilst lower down the axis we go, the lower risk of dying. The further we go to the right of the horizontal axis, the more steps we take.
It’s pretty clear from the chart, that doing no steps gives no benefit, and doing 10,000+ steps gives the most net benefit. In other words, the risk of dying from all causes reduces with a higher step count. But the trend of the line on the graph is not straight - in fact, it’s rather curved - which suggests more health benefits come from the first load of steps!
Putting the chart into words
What Liu et al. find is:
The first 4,000 steps you do are associated with a 37% reduction in death by all causes.
Around 6,400 steps is linked with a 60% reduction in death by all causes.
And 10,000 steps are associated with a 75% reduction in death by all causes.
It becomes a little more nuanced when we read between the lines and start to think about the realities of individual people’s circumstances.
Consider each 1% reduction in all cause mortality as a little chunk of benefit to your health. We stand to gain the most chunks per unit of effort, from the first 4,000 steps we take per day, thus a larger return on our time and effort investment.
Adding further steps on top of 4,000 steps per day, offers smaller magnitudes of benefits, but benefits nonetheless. For some people, further investment is worth it… the juice is worth the squeeze. For others, the juice is not worth the squeeze.
For the non juice squeezers and the all-or-nothing ers - rather than trying and failing to hit the arbitrary 10,000 steps per day, which may result in you giving up altogether; it is far more empowering for you to focus on a step count that is realistic and complementary to your lifestyle and health status, and offers you a level of benefit you are happy with. You deserve to understand the grey area and choose where you sit in it. That might look like choosing to do 4,000 steps, then build up to 5,000, then 6,000.
Main take homes
You don’t need to do 10,000 steps to benefit your health but if you can then that’s great. If you're struggling to get 10,000 steps then remember what you are doing (especially the first 4,000-6,000 steps) is still giving you massive health benefits. That's a reason to keep going!
"Is there evidence that walking groups have health benefits? A ...." https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/49/11/710.
"Physical activity - World Health Organization (WHO)." 5 Oct. 2022, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/physical-activity.
"About us | YAMAX is a export division of YAMASA TOKEI KEIKI CO ...." http://www.yamax-yamasa.com/aboutus/.
"The evolved basis and adaptive functions of cognitive distortions." https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2044-8341.1998.tb01002.x.
"Social illusions and self-deception: The evolution of biases in ...." https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-97472-001.
"Dose-response association between the daily step count and all ...." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02640414.2022.2099186