The fitness benchmark has surprisingly unscientific origins – yet it does contain more than a kernel of truth
The idea that we need to walk 10,000 steps a day originated not in medical research but in a 1960s marketing campaign for a pedometer, says Jack McNamara, senior lecturer in clinical exercise physiology at the University of East London. The round number was easy to remember and the idea caught on, despite there being no scientific evidence for 10,000 steps as a specific threshold for health.
“When the research community looked into it, they found that there were health benefits, so it didn’t necessarily get thrown out as pseudoscience,” says McNamara.