The daily step goal on hundreds of millions of wrists and phones did not come out of a laboratory. It came out of a marketing department.
In the mid-1960s, riding the fitness buzz around the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Japanese clock and instrument company Yamasa released a step counter called the Manpo-kei. The name means, roughly, “10,000-step meter.” The number was a slogan first and a health goal second.
Where did 10,000 come from, and does the science back it up? The figure was chosen because it sounded good, and the research since then points to real benefits well below it.
We are writers and editors, not clinicians. What follows is journalism about what the research says, not personal health advice. Anyone making decisions about their own activity levels, particularly with an existing health condition, should talk to a qualified professional.
A pedometer named after a round number
The origin is not seriously disputed by the researchers who study this. I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who has traced where the target came from, found nothing scientific behind it. “There were no actual studies that had looked at ‘10,000 steps’… It was a made-up number in the sense that 10,000 sounds good, it’s easy to remember,” she said.
She told Scientific American the figure was “just sort of a catchy phrase,” and that while 10,000 might seem like a reasonable goal, “there was not really any basis to it.” Writing for Harvard Health, she put it plainly: “the name was a marketing tool.”
None of that makes 10,000 steps a bad idea. The point is narrower. The number was picked to sell a device, not because a trial had tested it. It happened to land close to a genuinely healthy amount of walking, so it stuck for six decades.
What the research actually shows
Once scientists went looking, the evidence kept landing on a lower bar.
A 2023 review pooled 17 studies covering 226,889 people. It found that the risk of dying from any cause started to significantly fall at around 4,000 steps a day. The more people walked, the more the risk dropped: every extra 1,000 steps was linked to about 15% lower risk of death from any cause, and every extra 500 steps to about 7% lower risk of death from heart disease. More walking helped. The benefit simply began far earlier than the slogan suggested.
A 2025 study from Mass General Brigham pushed the floor lower still. Researchers tracked 13,547 older women, on average about 72 years old. Hitting 4,000 steps on just one or two days a week was tied to 26% lower risk of death and 27% lower risk of heart disease compared with never reaching that number. Doing it on three or more days a week was linked to up to 40% lower risk of death.
This is a single study of older, mostly white American women, and its authors are careful about that. It points to a benefit rather than proving one, and the researchers themselves say it needs testing in other groups. Lead author Rikuta Hamaya framed it as a hope, not a verdict: “I hope our findings encourage the addition of step count metrics to physical activity guidelines, including the upcoming 2028 U.S. Physical Activity Guidelines.”
A lower bar is still a real bar
It would be easy to read all this as permission to walk less, which misses the point. The evidence does not knock 10,000 steps down. It moves the entrance. Measurable and significant benefits appear to start early, around 4,000 steps for many people, and keep building as the count climbs.
Someone happy at 10,000 has no reason to cut back. Someone quietly defeated by a target that always felt out of reach has good reason to know it was never the finish line the marketing made it out to be.
For someone walking two or three thousand steps a day, the research suggests that getting to around four thousand, even on only some days of the week, could be highly beneficial. That is a target most people can actually reach.
