Do you really need 10,000 steps/day?

“I will make 10 0000 steps today!”

“I reached my goal: today I walked 10 000 steps!”.

What is it with these 10,000 steps? Why not 9,000 or 11,000?

The 1964 Tokyo Olimpic Games generated a health craze at the time, with everyone wanting to get fit and loose weight. At that time, the Yamasa Corporation introduced a simple modern device to help fight obesity, and improve fitness – a “step tracker” – nowadays called it a pedometer.

🚶Imagine there was once a day there were no pedometers? 😆

The Yamasa Corporation used a clever marketing slogan naming their product “manpo-kei”, which means “10,000 steps meter”.

However, let’s take a look back, and  give credit to the right people:  In 1780 Abraham-Louis Perrelet of Switzerland created the very first pedometer.

And finally our very own Thomas Jefferson (yes -The Founding Father and Third U.S. President - http://thomasjeffersonleadership.com/blog/have-you-walked-10000-steps-today/) introduced the pedometer to U.S. and modified the device (https://walkertracker.com/blog/the-evolution-of-the-pedometer/).

How about today?

Why suddenly we return to 10,000 steps?

It has a lot to do with “Outliers”, the bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell, where he popularized the “10,000 Hours” rule: Practice [just about anything] for 10,000 hours and become a world-class expert.

As all these stories come together, the number 10,000 stuck, and with technology becoming ever more ubiquitous, pedometers are in every device. Think of how FitBit, the most popular pedometer is in everyone’s wrists and every Smartphone counts your steps.

However, how does this fit with the current scientific research?

Should we all walk around the room before midnight to hit the 10,000 mark?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

First, we looked at a 2004 research published in the journal “Sports Medicine”(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14715035/) and here is what we found :

• Less than 5000 steps/day was deemed to be a sedentary lifestyle index. That would be me certain days in the office, so I better start walking the hallway more often during the day

• 5000-7499 steps/day was identified as “typical of daily activity excluding sports/exercises” and named low active

• 7500-9999 steps/day was qualified as somewhat active

• Finally, the magic “more than 10000 steps/day” was minted as and active lifestyle.

• Furthermore, that study qualified as a highly active lifestyle for those with greater than 12,500 steps/day.

Then recently ( May, 2019 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31141585/) a new article was published, and you will like this, there is no reason to walk around the house at night before going to bed to hit the 10,000 mark ( at least for the elder women in this study, that is). The study carried out from 2011-2015 included 17,466 U.S. females ages 67-77 years.  They all used an accelerometer during “walking hours” for  seven days ( >10h/day, and at least 4 days). The researchers claim that based on their data analysis and information gathered from their samples, 4,400 steps/day will significantly lower your risk of death when compare to 2,700 steps/day.

The risk proportionally decreased with the number of steps, up to 7,500 steps/day, but no significant changes when surpassed.

However we look at it, the message is straightforward: get up and walk!

Measuring daily steps is a healthy habit. We should monitor ourselves and our elder parents for this. This is an easy measure of our first decline in overall health.

But as Physical Therapists and creators of Finch, we know there is a lot more than Step Count, however important it is (and it is!). But there are many other simple factors and easily acomplishable mobility tasks that measure and improve our overall health, Healthspan, and ultimately: Lifespan.

How about the speed of walking as a sign?

Quality of the walk?

Balance?

And another dozen other factors the Finch will keep an eye on for you every second of every day.

These are some of the reasons we created the Finch: To assist our parents and our patients in remaining healthy, safe in their own homes, allowing them to stay well longer.

The Finch Team is here to prevent the fall before it happens!

If you have to summon an ambulance, it is already too late!

The Finch Team