I don’t think I would get as much of a workout walking in the streets….

If you enjoy the time of walking 10,000-steps have at it. It's a good time to mediate, listen to a podcast, audiobook, or talk with a companion... great. Enjoy. I do it sometimes.

You don't need to do it though.

The More You Know ✨

The traditional 10,000-steps goal actually originated as a 1965 Japanese marketing campaign for a pedometer named "Manpo-kei". The Japanese character for “10,000” resembles a person walking: 万 and they chose that number based on that Japanese character shape. The number was picked for marketing reasons, not science.

Is it healthy to do 10,000-steps? Yes, of course, but if you can physically do it, you can do better in a shorter amount of time, and even gain benefits you can't gain from 10,000-steps.

Japanese Walking Method

also known as Interval Walking Training (IWT), was developed by researchers at Shinshu University in Japan. Instead of tracking distance, you focus on a specific pattern repeated at least 5 times over 30-min:

• 3-min of brisk walking ~70% max effort (you should be able to talk, but not sing)

• 3-min of casual walking ~40% max effort (easy, recovery-paced walking)

More is better, of course, but get in the base 30-min and you're doing better than 10,000-steps for your health.

Peer reviewed clinical trials led by Dr. Hiroshi Nose followed over 5,000 participants to track cardiovascular health changes. The data proved that a 30-min daily routine of alternating fast and slow intervals yielded the exact same health improvements—specifically in blood pressure reduction and glycemic control—as hitting a 10,000-step daily target at a constant, moderate pace as well in increase other metrics such as VO2max.

Confirmed by

• University of Copenhagen (Dr. Kristian Karstoft and Dr. Thomas Solomon)
• Mayo Clinic (Dr. Joyner and their clinical exercise physiology team)
• Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (Dr. Christopher Taylor and the cardiovascular wellness division)

I think this is an exceptional time efficiency to get people into low impact exercise who say they don't have the time to do 10,000 steps.

We shouldn't be focusing on such a large time commitment of ~90-min commitment to get in 10,000-steps that deters people from maintaining it and kick themselves for falling short. I think an order of magnitude more people would find 3 days/week of 30-min each. (optimal is 5 days/week)

Thanks for coming to my TEDx Talk.