Where 10,000 steps came from, and who made it up

The 10,000 step goal is on watch faces, in workplace wellness schemes and in national health campaigns. It is repeated so often that it reads like a clinical recommendation. It is not one, and it never was.

This page lays out where the number actually came from, who traced it, and what the people who study walking for a living say about it now.

What was the manpo-kei?

The manpo-kei was a consumer pedometer launched in Japan in 1965 by Yamasa Tokei, a clock and instrument manufacturer. The name is three Japanese words: man means 10,000, po means steps, kei means meter. Put together, manpo-kei reads as ten-thousand-step meter. The target and the product were the same thing.

The timing mattered. Japan had hosted the 1964 Tokyo Olympics the year before, and national interest in personal fitness was unusually high. Yamasa Tokei launched a device that let an ordinary person measure their own activity for the first time, and it named that device after a round, memorable number.

Was there any research behind 10,000?

No. There was no study of 10,000 steps a day at the time the pedometer was named, because nobody had run one. The figure was chosen because it is clean, memorable, and sounds like an achievement rather than a chore. It was a name, and it was a good one.

Some accounts also note that the Japanese character for 10,000 resembles a walking figure, which would have made it a neat name for a step counter. This is not a fringe claim. It is the consensus position among the researchers who study step counts, and it appears in peer-reviewed literature rather than only in journalism.

Which researchers say so?

Catrine Tudor-Locke, a walking-behaviour researcher, is the person most associated with tracing the slogan back to the 1965 device and with documenting how research design has since kept the number alive rather than tested it. The bluntest statement, though, is in a clinical journal rather than in a history of pedometers.

The clearest statement in the peer-reviewed record is in the opening of a 2019 JAMA Internal Medicine paper by I-Min Lee and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which studied step volume and mortality in 16,741 older women. Its first sentence on the topic is unambiguous.

A goal of 10 000 steps/d is commonly believed by the public to be necessary for health, but this number has limited scientific basis.

Lee et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, 2019

That sentence is doing a lot of quiet work. It appears in the Importance section of a paper in a major clinical journal, which is where authors state the gap their study is addressing. The gap, stated plainly, is that the most famous number in consumer fitness had no evidence behind it.

Why did a marketing name become a health target?

Three things kept it alive. The manpo-kei sold well and the name travelled with the product. Walking associations formed around the figure in Japan and organised walks measured on the device. And once 10,000 was circulating, researchers had a convenient round number to use as a comparison group.

That put it into the literature as a reference point rather than as a tested threshold. There is also an accident of arithmetic in its favour. Moving from a typical sedentary 3,000 to 5,000 steps a day up to 10,000 is a meaningful increase in daily activity for most people. The number was not derived from evidence, but it was not absurd either, which is exactly the kind of claim that survives for sixty years without being checked.

What replaced it?

Nothing replaced it in public consciousness, but the research has moved a long way. A 2025 systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis in The Lancet Public Health, covering 57 studies, found that the benefit curve bends between 5,000 and 7,000 steps a day for death from any cause, cardiovascular disease, dementia and falls.

Compared with 2,000 steps, 7,000 was associated with a 47% lower risk of death from any cause. A 2022 meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts, led by Amanda Paluch, found the same plateau at about 6,000 to 8,000 steps for adults over 60 and 8,000 to 10,000 for adults under 60. The Lee study found risk levelling off at roughly 7,500 steps.

The numbers those three papers produce are close to each other and lower than 10,000. What to do with that is covered in what is a good step goal.

Does any of this mean 10,000 is bad?

No. A goal being unearned is not the same as a goal being wrong. If you hit 10,000 steps a day comfortably and enjoy it, the 2025 review shows benefit continuing above 7,000, just rising more slowly. Nothing here is an argument for walking less.

It matters for the other person: the one whose watch has been showing a red, unmet 10,000 every evening for two years. That person was handed a 1965 pedometer's product name as a medical target, and it has been quietly telling them they are failing ever since. For them the origin story is not trivia. It is permission to pick a different number.

How can you check this yourself?

Every claim on this page is in a free abstract or an open-access paper, which is unusual for this topic and worth using. You do not need a university login or a subscription to read any of the three sources below, and two of them are a single page.

• The Lee quote is in the Importance section of the abstract, which is free to read on PubMed. You do not need journal access.
• The Ding and Paluch abstracts are also free on PubMed and carry the full hazard ratios and confidence intervals.
• For the manpo-kei history specifically, prefer accounts written by physical-activity researchers over general lifestyle coverage. Most lifestyle articles on this topic cite each other rather than a source.

What else do people ask?

The origin story raises the same four follow-up questions every time, usually from someone who has just realised their watch has been quoting a 1965 advertisement at them. Short answers below, each traceable to one of the three papers in the source list at the end of this page.

Who invented the 10,000 steps a day goal?

Yamasa Tokei, a Japanese clock and instrument company, which launched a pedometer called the manpo-kei in 1965. The name translates as ten-thousand-step meter, so the target and the product name were the same thing from the start.

What does manpo-kei mean?

It is three Japanese words. Man means 10,000, po means steps, and kei means meter or gauge. Manpo-kei therefore reads as ten-thousand-step meter, which was the name of the 1965 Yamasa Tokei pedometer.

Is the 10,000 steps figure based on any study?

No study of 10,000 steps existed when the pedometer was named. The 2019 JAMA Internal Medicine paper by Lee and colleagues states directly that the number has limited scientific basis, which is unusually blunt language for a clinical journal.

How many steps does the research actually support?

The 2025 Lancet Public Health review of 57 studies points at around 7,000 a day, with the benefit curve for most outcomes bending between 5,000 and 7,000. Two earlier meta-analyses found plateaus in the same range.