Do you really need to take 10,000 steps a day?
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. Today is September 21, 2023 and this is lesson 609. That means JR has uploaded the full and complete lesson content to PlainEnglish.com/609.
Coming up today: Do you really need to take 10,000 steps a day? Now that we all carry pedometers in our pockets—in the form of our phones—it’s easy to count our steps and see how active we are. And 10,000 steps per day is the most popular goal. Today, we’ll explore where that number came from and whether you really need to move around quite so much.
In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you what it means to “capitalize on” a situation. And we have a song of the week. Let’s get going.
Do you really need 10,000 steps?
Over exactly the last twelve months, I have taken an average of 10,029 steps per day. This is according to my iPhone’s Health app. If my phone is correct, I’m just barely reaching the recommended number of steps per day.
But I haven’t always been so successful. In 2020, for example, the pandemic year in which we were all cooped up at home, I took only an average of 5,451 steps per day. And before the pandemic, I was averaging only about 7,000 steps per day.
So that means for many years, I was falling well short of the “recommended” 10,000 steps per day. But how real is that recommendation anyway?
You might be surprised at the number’s origin. Modern smartphones have an accelerometer, which measures the phone’s movement up and down, back and forth. If your phone is in your pocket or in a bag, it can log a step.
But it hasn’t always been that easy to track steps: you used to have to attach a plastic pedometer to your belt and wear it everywhere you went. Every time you took a step forward, the manual counter would advance one number.
In the early 1960s , a Japanese clock maker created an early pedometer, hoping to capitalize on the country’s interest in fitness ahead of the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. They called the pedometer the 10,000-step meter.
It doesn’t sound that great in English, but the Japanese character for “ten thousand” looks like a walking man—a nice coincidence in Japanese. And so the standard for 10,000 steps was born—not on the basis of any scientific study, but because of a coincidence.
Ten thousand steps, however, is a plausible number. Plenty of people achieve it—clearly I did. So people believed it, and as smartphone step counters spread, many people have walked around the block, taken the stairs, or parked far from the entrance just to reach five digits in their step counters.
But is ten thousand the right number? Like most general exercise or general health advice, you should dig a little deeper to see if this number makes sense for you. Let’s start with general health.
If you are looking to extend your life expectancy and keep your heart healthy, then 8,000 steps gives you the best benefits, if you’re under 60. One study showed that people who took 8,000 steps a day were much less likely to suffer from heart disease, compared to those who took just 4,000 steps. This study, and others, found that going from 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day was fine, but it didn’t give you much additional benefit in terms of heart health.
If you’re over 60, then the story is a little different. You get the same benefits from about 6,000 steps. The key is energy efficiency. An older person expends more energy taking one step than a younger person does—so an older person’s 6,000 steps are like a younger person’s 8,000.
So here’s a question. Is a taller person’s step the same as a shorter person’s step? If the question is about energy expenditure, then the answer is yes. One step for a tall person burns the same amount of energy as one step for a short person. So my 10,000 steps are the same as a tall person’s 10,000 steps. The only difference is that I cover less ground than the tall person for the same number of steps.
Still, this is highly, highly general advice. If you follow an exercise routine, then you might be burning calories or getting exercise from things other than walking, in which case your step count is less relevant. And step count guidelines only really talk about general health: life expectancy, heart disease, things like that. If you’re trying to lose weight or if you have another fitness goal, step counts are not as relevant.
What’s the average step count? Only about 5,000 per day. So that means the average person could achieve a longer life expectancy by adding only about 2,000 to 3,000 steps per day—about the equivalent of a twenty-minute walk.
I never looked at the step count until the pandemic year—so I told you, I averaged 5,000 per day in 2020, but that covers up the fact that early in the pandemic I was getting like, 1,500 to 2,000 per day. Basically nothing.
And I felt it, too. I just felt like I wasn’t moving, so that was the first time I opened up the health app to look at my step counts—more out of curiosity than anything else. And I was horrified at what I saw. Gyms were closed. Everything was closed. I was working at home. I was basically not moving. I was barely alive. And then I told myself, this cannot continue. So I got in the habit of going for long walks until I could get back into my exercise routine.
I don’t really look at the step count anymore, except once in a while. I think my record, back when I was roaming the city looking for an apartment, was 21,000 per day. I felt it the next morning!
JR’s song of the week
It’s Thursday, so JR has a song of the week for us. He has selected “Pyro” by Kings of Leon. They’re an alternative rock group and they performed this song on “Saturday Night Live” in 2010. The song this week is “Pyro” by Kings of Leon.
If you want to hear a clip, I can’t play it here, but I do post them to our Instagram stories. So follow us @plainenglishpod on Instagram, and check out our stories to hear the songs each week.
If you’ve ever taken an English class, you’ve probably heard the word “capitalize.” It means, to make the first letter a capital letter. Like, you need to capitalize names of countries. But today, I used the phrasal verb “capitalize on” and it means something else entirely. That’s next.
Great stories make learning English fun
