iStockphoto / sportpoint
According to the latest studies, approximately 1-in-5 Americans use fitness trackers like the Apple Watch, Whoop Band, Garmin, etc. And many of those Americans, myself included, obsess over daily stats without ever taking time to learn where the daily benchmarks are rooted in science or not.
I mention that because a new study looking at the daily walking habits of 13,000+ older woman found that walking just 4,000 steps per day reduced risk of death by 40%. There are extreme limitations to this study, to be sure (age, gender, location, etc) but this is a great reminder that the 10,000 steps per day many health conscious individuals strive to hit is a completely arbitrary number that was created by a Japanese company to sell pedometers back in the 1960s.
I recently learned about that backstory from the Mayo Clinic on Nutrition. They had an episode from May 6th titled ‘The Truth Behind ‘10,000 Steps A Day’: Using Health Tech to Improve Your Wellbeing’ which is interesting timing for this study to just come out now.
Anyway, what I learned was the widely held belief that we achieve 10,000 steps per day in order to reduce our risk of death actually came about when a company in Japan wanted to sell a Japanese pedometer named “Manpo-kei” which translates to “man steps meter.” I
They had decided that the Japanese character/letter/number for 10,000 vaguely looks like someone walking or running and that is how the widely held global standard of walking 10,000 steps/day came into existence. Nobody fact checked this for decades. The 10K steps/day number came into existence and everyone just went with it! In their defense, the Japanese character for 10,000 does vaguely look like someone walking/running: Kanji, 万.
New Study Finds 4,000 Steps Per Day Reduces Risk Of Death By 40%
The new study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine by Rikuta Hamaya (Boston), R Evenson (UNC Chapel Hill), Daniel Lieberman (Harvard) , and Min Lee (Boston). The study titled Association between frequency of meeting daily step thresholds and all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease in older women followed the 13,000 participants for 10-11 years to look into the impact of daily steps on cardiovascular outcomes.
It dove into various daily thresholds of steps (4K, 5K, 6K, etc) and what it found is 4,000 steps per day reduced the overall risk of death by 40%. More specifically, it found that walking 4,000 steps 3 or more days a week reduced risk of death from cardiovascular outcomes by 32% (40% for all-cause related deaths).
Interestingly, it found benefits plateaued by about 16% at 5K-7K steps/day but did improve over 4,000 to 5-7K.
Why do we still fall for the 10K steps per day propaganda?
Circling back to that episode of the Mayo Clinic on Nutrition podcast about the truth behind 10K steps/day (stream it above), I can only speak for myself, but I can tell you it was very illuminating to learn that the 10K steps/day was nothing more than a clever marketing ploy and I told myself I wouldn’t place as much importance on hitting that number of steps every day and then I completely let that go within a few days and still obsess over the 10K/day number.
There are some days when it’s 11PM at night and I realize I haven’t hit 10,000 steps per day and will go out and walk around the trails near my house just to hit that threshold. My biggest takeaway here is humans are not rational. I know the number isn’t magical yet my brain tells me ‘get up, you have to do it’ if I haven’t.
I’m currently training for my first triathlon (in January) and the 10K steps per day is an easy number to hit most days but when I’m traveling, it’s a rest day, I’m lifting + non-running cardio, I’m on the bike and/or swimming… There are just days when steps are an after thought. And yet I still obsess over this stupid number from the Japanese marketing ploy in the 1960s…
What to take away from this…
Ultimately, as we saw in this new study, there is a threshold where the benefits wane. That seems to be the case with nearly every endurance-related activity and often those activities then reach a threshold where they could potentially have detrimental health effects at the extremes. But we aren’t talking about that!
Is walking 10,000 steps per day great? Absolutely. I feel good about hitting numbers. My watch tells me that I’m averaging 14,277 steps/day this week and 13,501 over the past month. For someone who sits at a computer all day for work, that’s not bad.
But what this new study found is 4,000 steps/day is a great threshold for reducing cardiovascular related deaths in older women. It found no more, no less. Don’t read this and then tell yourself you HAVE to hit some arbitrary number of steps without researching why that number might be right for you.
Stand up. Go for walks. Get outside. Pay attention to what you eat/avoid ultra-processed foods. Your health outcomes will improve.
This 2020 article from Suzie Glassman on Medium is a great breakdown of the 10K/day history for those who want to learn the full back story.