Why I’ve embraced 10,000 steps a day

I used to look down on the concept of walking for exercise. If you didn’t break a sweat, what even was the point? Lately, though, I’ve embraced the concept of 10,000 steps a day, a seductively simple goal that requires neither lycra nor a gym membership to achieve.

Walking 10,000 steps a day has probably been around since the Stone Age or before, when the practice was likely known as “finding food”. The modern-day incarnation was invented in Japan in the 1960s, after the Tokyo Olympics, by a company selling a rudimentary pedometer to a nation newly obsessed with all things fitness. The device was known as the Manpo-kei, or “10,000 steps meter”.

Though the concept of 10,000 steps has enjoyed a renaissance in these radically sedentary times – during lockdown, it’s estimated most people were averaging only about 3000 steps a day – those who advise us on our health for a living are not sold on it, as an organising principle. One doctor I talked to said he would not necessarily recommend 10,000 steps as a goal to patients, especially those who were looking to lose weight. “If you get to 10,000 steps and celebrate with junk food, that’s not ideal,” the doctor explained. This was a personal affront to his interlocutor, who was enjoying an ice-cream after a hard day of stepping.

Whether or not 10,000 steps are the answer to everyone’s problems, professionals agree that walking is an underrated form of exercise. One Stanford University study showed that walking increased creative output by 60 per cent. And apparently a 10-minute walk may be just as good as a 40-minute one for relieving anxiety. What’s more, walking for 15 minutes daily reduces the chance of death by 22 per cent, which is the sort of stat that always confuses me because isn’t everyone’s risk of death 100 per cent?

Dogs, by the way, love walking and smile all the time. That can’t be a coincidence.

Still, I’ll take all these scientifically proven benefits and raise them. On a podcast – I can’t remember which one because I’m listening to so many on my strolls these days – I heard that the reason walking is calming is because your eyes are compelled to settle on the middle distance, which in evolutionary terms means you are safe and not at risk of predators.

This sounds like the sort of theory Elon Musk would sign up to, but it also rings true to my own experience. Since starting the 10,000 steps challenge a few weeks ago, I’ve noticed all sorts of things in the world around me that I wouldn’t have otherwise registered, like a pocket of mushrooms down the block which reliably grows after rain, or dogs who live on the next street over that I’ve never clocked before. Dogs, by the way, love walking and smile all the time. That can’t be a coincidence.

Here I’ll cop to walking’s inherent dagginess, especially the dagginess of walking … nowhere. I wear a very large, very floppy hat, sandals only an orthopaedist could love and the sweet scent of my children’s SPF spray. And when I reach the park a couple of kilometres away, which is bounded by a busy intersection, I turn right around and walk back.

Overall, the 10,000 steps thing has given me something to focus on without hyping it up too much. You know how there are those days you plan to work out and the task takes on this Herculean quality? Walking is never Herculean. It’s positively pedestrian, which is exactly why it works.

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