10,000 steps based on bad science, says Guardian

More bad news from Britain’s Guardian newspaper (or it could be good news, if you think everyone should just take up running instead): the 10,000 steps idea as a fitness goal is all wet.

Turns out, it’s a bit like the 10,000 hours theory of mastery discussed by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: consumers have glommed onto it as a marker (in this case, for basic fitness), when it’s actually a completely arbitrary figure with no research to back it up. (According to the Guardian, it originated in Japan in the 1960s.) And it has spawned an entire industry of wearable tech that either reassures people who manage to cover their 10,000 steps a day that they are adequately fit (when they may not be), or is so ambitious it discourages them from bothering to try to reach the goal.

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Watch your step: why the 10,000 daily goal is built on bad science | Life and style | The Guardian https://t.co/c3R2kLSPF7

— Trent Stellingwerff (@TStellingwerff) November 20, 2018

As you may have noticed if you use a GPS with a step-tracking feature, your running steps probably average somewhere around 1 metre in length, which makes the math easy. So if you go for a 10K run, you’ll run somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 steps. If you subscribe to the 10,000 steps theory, does that mean you must run (or walk) the equivalent of a 10K every day in order to call yourself fit? And how many people who don’t run or walk for fitness ever come close to 10,000 steps per day? (And what if you work a desk job, and your step count on non-running days hovers somewhere around one-third to half of the 10,000-step goal?)

We all know people who run that 10K every day for what they assume is basic fitness. They don’t vary their training, and they don’t race. But are they even achieving the goal of fitness? Or is a daily 10K possibly far more than enough?

RELATED: According to Strava, most people let fitness goals slide today

These are all questions worth asking, especially for runners who may find themselves injured and unable to run for a period of time. Obviously we need to be creative about finding ways to maintain fitness when we can’t run, but what’s the bottom line?

One measure of fitness is the reduction of disease at different activity levels, and the article claims there’s evidence that 6,000 to 8,000 steps is enough to lower rates of cardiovascular disease–and that the sweet spot might actually be around 7,500 steps (which is in line with the 30-minutes-a-day guideline set by many public health authorities).

And there is research to show that many more health benefits may be had by increasing the recommendation to something much higher–good news for those of us already doing that, but probably unrealistic for the non-running population.

“One of the major problems with the 10,000-steps-a-day goal,” the article continues, “is that it doesn’t take into account the intensity of exercise. Getting out of breath and increasing your heart rate may well be even more important than the exact number of steps taken. Researchers are currently conducting studies to see whether people who take 10,000 steps a day merely by pottering around their house achieve the same health benefits as those who do so by brisk walking or playing sport.” Agreed–though it’s impossible to get anywhere close to 10,000 steps by pottering around the house.

The article cites a June 2018 study by Catrine Tudor-Locke of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that looked at cadence, or how fast steps should be taken to result in a fitness benefit. The conclusion was 100 steps per minute, which is around 10:00/km, about the pace of brisk walking (or very slow jogging).