The 10,000-Step Goal Began as a 1960s Pedometer's Name, Not a Medical Finding

In 1965, a Japanese company began selling a pedometer called the manpo-kei. Man means 10,000, po means step and kei means meter, so the name reads as “10,000-step meter.” If your phone or watch sets you a goal of 10,000 steps a day, that product name is where it comes from.

Nobody tested that number against how long people live until decades later. When researchers finally did, you might have expected the old goal to fall apart. Instead it landed near the top of the range where the benefit levels off.

A pedometer timed to the Olympics

Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics in October 1964, and the games left Japan with a fresh appetite for sport and fitness. The manpo-kei reached shops the following year. Business Insider Japan, in a piece on the device’s history, reported that the maker chose the name for its pleasant sound.

The researcher most often tied to the number is Yoshiro Hatano, a Japanese scientist who studied walking and health. You will find sources split on his part in the device itself. Japan’s Sasakawa Sports Foundation says Hatano began selling the manpo-kei, while I-Min Lee of Harvard has credited a Japanese company with marketing it. The part you can check is a 1993 paper in which Hatano argued that 10,000 steps was about twice what a sedentary Japanese man walked in a day, and that the difference would burn roughly 300 extra calories.

A small round vintage pedometer with a chrome rim and a blank cream dial with one needle sits on a sunlit honey-wood table beside a folded teal handkerchief, a coiled brown leather belt and a peach on a cream dish, with worn canvas shoes on the floor behind. — *The first character of manpo-kei is 万, the Japanese character for 10,000, which put the goal right in the product’s name.*

That sum was a fair guess about energy, though it told you nothing about how long you’d live.

You can still see why the number stuck. It’s round, you can’t forget it, and a counter clipped to your belt tells you by dinner whether you hit it.

How a slogan became a standard

By the 2000s, 10,000 had moved from packaging into research papers. In a 2004 article in the journal Sports Medicine, Catrine Tudor-Locke and David Bassett proposed a set of step ranges for researchers. Under that scale, you were “active” at 10,000 steps a day or more and “sedentary” if you logged fewer than 5,000. Between those sat “low active” at 5,000 to 7,499 and “somewhat active” at 7,500 to 9,999, with “highly active” starting at 12,500.

Those cutoffs were a working proposal, and they gave the pedometer’s number a scientific home. A 2010 pedometer study of 1,136 American adults, led by Bassett at the University of Tennessee, found they averaged 5,117 steps a day.

If you were a typical American then, the goal asked you to roughly double your day.

Tudor-Locke and Bassett offered these bands as a starting point for researchers, years before any large study tied daily steps to deaths.

What 16,741 older women showed

The first big test of steps and survival came from Harvard epidemiologist I-Min Lee. Her team asked 16,741 women in the long-running Women’s Health Study to wear a step counter on the hip during waking hours for 7 days, sometime between 2011 and 2015. The women averaged 72 years old. Over about 4.3 years of follow-up, 504 of them died.

Published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2019, the results put the biggest gain at the low end. Women who averaged about 4,400 steps a day had a 41 percent lower death rate than women at about 2,700. Death rates kept falling as steps rose, then leveled off near 7,500.

Lee also looked at pace. Once total steps were counted, a brisker stride didn’t add a measurable edge, so you didn’t need to hurry for your steps to count.

“Taking 10,000 steps a day can sound daunting. But we find that even a modest increase in steps taken is tied to significantly lower mortality in older women.”

I-Min Lee, Brigham and Women’s Hospital news release, 2019

If you’re past 70 and the old goal has always felt out of reach, this was the first large study to show the curve going flat well before you’d get there.

Fifteen groups, one flattening curve

In 2022, an international group led by Amanda Paluch of the University of Massachusetts Amherst pooled step data from 15 cohorts on four continents. The analysis covered 47,471 adults, 3,013 of whom died during a median follow-up of 7.1 years, and it appeared in The Lancet Public Health.

The team split people into four equal groups by daily steps, so you can see the curve in four points. Measured against the least active quarter, with a median of 3,553 steps, the risk of death was 60 percent as high at 5,801 steps, 55 percent at 7,842 and 47 percent at 10,901.

Risk of death compared with the least active group, from Paluch and colleagues in The Lancet Public Health, 2022. The 15 cohorts began tracking people between 1999 and 2018.

Look at the gaps between the dots and you’ll see where the payoff sits. Moving from the first group to the second cut risk by 40 percentage points. Going from 5,801 to 10,901 steps, about 5,100 more a day, cut it by another 13 percentage points.

Age moves the plateau

Age changed where the curve went flat. For adults 60 and older, risk stopped falling at about 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day. For adults under 60, it leveled off at about 8,000 to 10,000, which puts the manpo-kei’s number at the top of that range.

As in Lee’s study, walking pace showed no clear link with risk once total steps were counted, which means the steps you take on errands count as much as a power walk.

The 2025 review points to 7,000

A University of Sydney team took the widest view yet in The Lancet Public Health in July 2025. Their review drew on 57 studies from 35 cohorts and more than 160,000 adults. Compared with 2,000 steps a day, 7,000 steps went with a 47 percent lower risk of death, a 38 percent lower risk of dementia and a 28 percent lower risk of falls.

Those comparisons start from 2,000 steps, a very inactive day, so they show what you gain by getting off the couch, not what you’d lose by stopping at 7,000.

Some outcomes, heart disease among them, kept improving past 7,000. For most others, the review reported only modest gains beyond that point. Here’s how the three studies compare when you line them up.

Study	Year	Who was tracked	Where the benefit leveled off
Lee and colleagues, JAMA Internal Medicine	2019	16,741 U.S. women, average age 72	About 7,500 steps
Paluch and colleagues, The Lancet Public Health	2022	47,471 adults in 15 cohorts	6,000 to 8,000 steps at 60 and older; 8,000 to 10,000 under 60
University of Sydney review, The Lancet Public Health	2025	More than 160,000 adults in 57 studies	Most gains by about 7,000 steps

So was the pedometer wrong?

Mostly, it got lucky. A number picked for its sound lands inside the range where benefit flattens for adults under 60, and it overshoots for older adults by a couple of thousand steps. None of these studies found that 10,000 steps did you harm. Past the plateau, the extra steps simply stopped showing up as extra years.

An older Japanese man with swept-back white hair and a short white beard, in a sage quilted vest and cream shirt, walks down a quiet paved lane of low wooden houses in late-afternoon sun, carrying a cloth bag with leeks, past a parked bicycle, potted plants, a teal door and a persimmon tree. — *The 2018 federal guidelines add that adults who sit less and do any amount of moderate activity gain some health benefit.*

The federal Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, last revised in 2018, don’t give you a step count at all. They ask adults for 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, such as brisk walking. Steps are one handy way to track that, and the goal your device opened with is a setting you’re free to change. The best-supported figure in the 2025 review, 7,000 steps, sits 3,000 short of the number a Japanese pedometer was named for in 1965.

Chest pain, dizziness or joint pain on a walk can mean more than a long day. If you get any of them, call a clinician, especially when one is new, sharp or won’t settle.