How Many Steps Per Day Do You Really Need?

Mostly all fitness trackers, by default, suggest 10 000 steps as a daily steps goal.

The number looks pretty good. However, it has there is no research behind it. Moreover, it is not very clear where this number came from.

NY Times gives the following explanation:

According to Dr. I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert on step counts and health, the 10,000-steps target became popular in Japan in the 1960s. A clock maker, hoping to capitalize on interest in fitness after the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, mass-produced a pedometer with a name that, when written in Japanese characters, resembled a walking man

So, it looks like 10k is a pure marketing-driven story. Is there any research-backed alternative?

When I was searching for this a few years ago I did not find any.

But recently, I discovered the publication “Daily steps and all-cause mortality: a meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts” in “The Lancet”. The publication is a meta-analysis, what is good. However, the number of analyzed publications is rather small — what is not that great. But still.

According to the meta-analysis walking 8000+ steps per day increases your chances to live longer.

Or quoting the article itself:

Restricted cubic splines showed progressively decreasing risk of mortality among adults aged 60 years and older with increasing number of steps per day until 6000–8000 steps per day and among adults younger than 60 years until 8000–10 000 steps per day.

So, if you are doing 10k steps per day — you still do it right!

Reading this article I had to recheck my daily average — numbers for the previous years I have already shown in the article “How many times I walked though the Europe with my Samsung Watches?”.

For this year the statistic is shown below:

9,868 steps per day — fewer than in the past years, but still in the good 8000+ zone.

Share your average daily steps count in the comments!