You’ve probably heard that the whole 10,000 steps a day thing was basically invented to sell pedometers.
That’s pretty close to true.
Back around 1965, a Japanese company called Yamasa introduced a pedometer called the manpo-kei.
Roughly translated:
10,000 steps meter.
It was a nice round number. Easy to remember. Easy to market.
It was not the result of some giant scientific study where researchers discovered that the human body requires precisely 10,000 steps.
Which is why people now love pointing out:
You know that 10,000-step goal? It’s just marketing.
Except the story got weird.
In 2022, researchers looked at 78,430 adults in the UK who had worn accelerometers to measure how much they actually moved. Then they followed them for nearly seven years to see who developed dementia.
More daily steps were associated with lower dementia incidence.
And where did the researchers estimate the greatest reduction?
9,826 steps a day.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Nearly sixty years after somebody in Japan put 10,000 on a pedometer, science wandered in and said:
Well...
That’s actually not a terrible number.
Now, 9,826 isn’t magic either.
This was an observational study. It can’t prove that walking those steps prevented dementia. And the researchers found meaningful associations at much lower numbers too. Around 3,800 steps a day was already associated with substantially lower dementia incidence.
So please don’t walk around your living room at 11:47 tonight because your watch says 9,743.
There is no cliff at 10,000.
I just love that one of the most famous supposedly arbitrary numbers in health got a second act.
Marketing guessed 10,000.
Science came back with 9,826.
Not bad.