It could be argued that a fitness wave that followed the 1964 Tokyo Olympics gave a Japanese clockmaker its opening. In 1965, Yamasa Tokei Keiki released a pedometer called the Manpo-kei, capitalising on a country newly enthusiastic about walking and exercise. The name translates roughly to “10,000 steps meter”.

It was a slogan, not a research finding but it has since travelled the world as though it were one.

A figure picked for a product launch sixty years is now treated by perhaps millions as the line between a healthy day and a lazy one.

A pedometer, a marketing team, and the 1964 Olympics

The word itself is built from three parts: man for 10,000, po for steps, kei for meter. The round number was easy to remember, which mattered for a product meant to sell. 

Catrine Tudor-Locke, a walking-behaviour researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has traced the slogan’s spread back to this moment. By her account, the device launched with a slogan that resonated with the Japanese public on the eve of the Olympics, and people were soon “manpo-kei’ing all over the place”. It was a brand name, not a tested health threshold.

What it was not, at the time, was a number with science behind it. I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who has studied step counts and mortality, has noted that when the device launched, “There were no actual studies that had looked at ‘10,000 steps.'” In her telling, the figure originated as a slogan, chosen because it sounded good and was easy to remember.

What science actually says about step counts

Marketing origin aside, the question of how many steps actually help was answered later, by people who were not selling pedometers. The answer they have kept arriving at sits below 10,000.

A 2019 study in JAMA Internal Medicine, led by Lee, followed 16,741 older women with a mean age of 72, measuring their steps with hip accelerometers. Women averaging around 4,400 steps a day had lower mortality than those averaging about 2,700. The benefit kept growing as steps rose, then levelled off at roughly 7,500 steps a day.

A 2025 review pointed in the same direction. The dose-response meta-analysis, published in The Lancet Public Health, pooled 57 studies from 35 cohorts. Compared with 2,000 steps a day, 7,000 steps was associated with a 47% lower risk of death from any cause.  

Melody Ding, a professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health has framed it plainly. In her words, aiming for 7,000 steps is “a realistic goal” given the range of outcomes the review examined.

There is a more forgiving message buried in the same data. Ding noted that even small increases — moving from around 2,000 to 4,000 steps a day, for example — are associated with significant health gains. The steepest returns appear to come not from reaching a round number but from moving more than you currently do.

Why the number stuck

So why does 10,000 persist when the research keeps landing lower? Part of the answer is probably that the number is good at being a number. It is round and memorable, and it makes no demands on the person repeating it.

A target of 7,283 steps, however well-grounded, would never have survived contact with a marketing department or a phone notification.

This article is for general information only and is not medical advice. If you have questions about activity levels, mobility, or any underlying health condition, talk to your doctor or a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your routine.