Unpopular opinion: hitting 10,000 steps a day is a total scam

I finally got a fitness tracker last month and was obsessed with hitting that 10,000 step goal. But after two weeks of forcing myself to walk circles in my kitchen at 9pm, I realized the number is completely made up. It came from a 1960s Japanese marketing campaign for a pedometer, not any real science. Has anyone else just stopped caring about that milestone and felt better for it?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowan72510d ago

it came from a 1960s Japanese marketing campaign for a pedometer, not any real science" - you're close but the math is a bit off actually. That 10k number was from a 1964 Japanese company that made a pedometer called Manpo-kei which literally means "10,000 steps meter" and they picked it cause the character for 10,000 looks like a little walking man or something similar. So yeah it was totally a marketing gimmick not based on research. But here's the thing, I don't think it's a total scam either. Multiple studies since then have shown that moving more is good for you and the sweet spot for most health benefits is somewhere between 6k and 8k steps a day depending on your age. So the number is made up but the idea behind it isn't completely worthless if you think of it as a loose target instead of some hard rule that you have to hit.

olivia_harris1910d ago

i get what you're saying but i gotta disagree hard here. calling 10k steps a "loose target" is still giving way too much credit to something that was literally just a marketing slogan. if the studies say 6k to 8k is the sweet spot then telling people 10k is a good goal is actually kinda harmful cause it sets them up to feel like they failed if they don't hit it. i see people beating themselves up all the time for getting 7k steps and thinking they're lazy. that pressure doesn't help anyone, it just makes people feel bad about perfectly healthy movement. plus the whole "move more is good" thing is so vague it's almost meaningless. sure moving is good but that doesn't mean we should be pushing a random number from the 1960s as a guideline. it's like saying "drinking water is good for you" and then claiming you need exactly 8 glasses a day just cause some old ad told you so. the studies you mentioned prove the real benefits are lower so why not just use what actually works instead of defending a made up number?