10,000 steps a day began as a 1965 pedometer pitch. 5 things studies found since

The 10,000-step goal on your phone or watch was never the result of a study. Most accounts trace it to a pedometer sold in Japan in 1965, and it stuck because the number was round and easy to remember. The studies that later put step counters on tens of thousands of adults point to a target that depends on your age, and for many people it’s lower.

Skip the round number for now. Open the health app on your phone, find your daily step average for last week, and add 1,000 to it. That sum is your daily target for this week, and the five findings below explain why it’s a sensible place to start.

1. A pedometer picked the number

In 1965, the year after Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics, a Japanese company began selling a clip-on step counter whose name translated to “10,000-step meter.”

No research chose that figure. I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who has spent years studying step counts, put it plainly in a 2019 piece for Harvard Health Publishing.

The name was a marketing tool.

Tokyo’s Summer Olympics ran in October 1964. The step counter behind the 10,000 figure went on sale the following year.

How far short Americans fall

The slogan has outlived the device by decades, and most Americans don’t come close to it. In 2003 the America On the Move study handed out pedometers and collected valid counts from 1,136 US adults. They averaged 5,117 steps a day, about half the goal.

That was also fewer steps than adults in Switzerland, Australia and Japan took, the authors wrote in their 2010 paper in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

2. 4,400 steps beat 2,700 in older women

Lee’s own team ran one of the first large tests of the slogan. Their 2019 paper in JAMA Internal Medicine followed 16,741 women from the long-running Women’s Health Study, with an average age of 72.

Each woman wore a step counter on her hip for a week between 2011 and 2015. Over the next 4.3 years on average, 504 of them died.

The researchers split the women into four equal groups by daily steps. The least active group’s median was 2,718 steps a day, and the next group’s was 4,363.

About 1,600 extra steps a day went with a large difference. Women at about 4,400 steps had a 41% lower death rate than women at about 2,700, after the researchers adjusted for other differences between the groups. On the chart below, with the least active group set at 100, that’s a death rate of 59.

The two most active groups, at medians of 5,905 and 8,442 steps, had death rates 46% and 58% lower than the least active group, or 54 and 42 against its 100. A finer curve in the same paper kept falling until about 7,500 steps a day and then flattened, well short of 10,000.

This was an observational study. It shows a link between steps and survival, not proof that the steps caused it, and women in poor health may have walked less to begin with.

3. Age changes where gains level off

In 2022 a team led by Amanda Paluch at the University of Massachusetts Amherst pooled 15 studies covering 47,471 adults on four continents. The paper appeared in The Lancet Public Health, with funding from the CDC.

As in Lee’s study, people were sorted into four groups by daily steps. The most active group, at a median of 10,901 steps a day, had a 53% lower risk of death than the least active group at 3,553.

The more useful result is where the benefit stopped growing. For adults 60 and older, risk fell with added steps until about 6,000 to 8,000 a day, then held steady. For adults younger than 60, it leveled off at about 8,000 to 10,000.

Find your age row and judge your weekly average against that range. If you’re over 60 and already walking 7,000 steps a day, the extra 3,000 to reach 10,000 didn’t show up as added benefit in this analysis.

A 2025 review points near 7,000

A broader 2025 review in the same journal pooled 57 studies on steps and a range of health outcomes. Compared with 2,000 steps a day, 7,000 was linked to a 47% lower risk of death from any cause.

The authors wrote that 10,000 can still be a target for people who are already more active, and that 7,000 “might be a more realistic and achievable target for some.”

4. Total steps mattered more than pace

Brisk walking sounds like it should count for more. Pace and step count are hard to pull apart, though, since people who walk faster usually rack up more steps as well.

A 2020 study in JAMA, led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute, tried to separate them using 4,840 US adults aged 40 and over from a national health survey. They wore step counters between 2003 and 2006, and the researchers tracked deaths through 2015, an average of 10.1 years.

Compared with 4,000 steps a day, 8,000 steps went with a 51% lower risk of death from any cause, and 12,000 steps with a 65% lower risk. Set 4,000 steps at 100, and those are risks of 49 and 35. Once total steps were accounted for, walking faster added no significant benefit.

Lee’s 2019 study of older women found the same pattern, with most pace measures fading once total steps were counted. The 2022 pooled analysis was more mixed. People whose fastest 30 minutes of the day were quicker still showed lower risk after total steps were counted, so pace isn’t worthless.

Slow steps go in your total too. The walk to the bus stop, a lap of the grocery store and pacing during a phone call all count, as long as your phone or watch is on you. For a pace check on a dedicated walk, the talk test from our walking and running comparison still works.

5. Each extra 1,000 steps counted

A 2023 analysis in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology pooled 17 studies with 226,889 people. Each extra 1,000 steps a day was linked to a 15% lower risk of death from any cause.

For deaths from heart and blood vessel disease, each extra 500 steps was linked to a 7% lower risk. The benefits showed up from about 3,867 steps a day for death from any cause, and from only 2,337 steps for heart and blood vessel deaths.

The studies in items 2 and 3 show the gains shrinking as counts climb. Your first added thousands do more than your last.

Adding 1,000 steps costs less time than it sounds. A 2011 review led by step researcher Catrine Tudor-Locke set 100 steps a minute as a reasonable floor for moderate walking. A 2019 lab study by her group found that a fast walk of about 130 steps a minute took roughly twice the effort of that floor for adults aged 21 to 40.

Minutes are steps divided by step rate, rounded. The 2019 lab study set its 130 mark by measuring oxygen use as people walked on a treadmill.

At 100 steps a minute, each 1,000 steps takes 10 minutes, so 2,000 take 20 and 3,000 take 30. At 130 steps a minute, the same counts take about 8, 15 and 23 minutes. Five walks of 30 moderate minutes a week also cover the federal 150-minute guideline that our walking and running comparison explains.

The same 2011 review found that programs to get people walking more usually raise daily counts by 2,000 to 2,500 steps, so a 1,000-step start leaves plenty of room. Fit your row’s minutes into a walk you already take, such as the trip to lunch. If you have a heart condition, joint pain or trouble with balance, ask your doctor how fast to build up.

Your next walk

Your target this week is one number, last week’s daily average plus 1,000. If the app showed 4,600, aim for 5,600 every day, which is about 10 extra minutes at a moderate pace. Check the new average next Sunday, and if you hit it, add another 1,000 for the week after. Stop climbing once you reach the range where the 2022 analysis saw gains level off, about 6,000 to 8,000 steps if you’re 60 or older and 8,000 to 10,000 if you’re younger.