From my “save this for later when you can’t think of a blog post” archive comes an Outside Magazine piece* on “Japanese walking,” or Interval Walking Training, developed in 2007 at Shinsu University.
IWT itself sounds interesting–“walk fast, then slow, three minutes each, five times per walking session, at least four days each week.”–but what got me is that the modern guideline of 10,000 steps a day is pretty much made up?
Ten thousand steps didn’t come from science. It came from a pedometer ad.
In mid-1960s Japan, amid a national fitness push ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, exercise physiologist Yoshiro Hatano estimated that doubling the average person’s daily steps—from about 4,000 to 10,000—“would result in an increased energy expenditure of about 300 kcal/day.” There were no clinical trials. No test subjects. Just back-of-the-envelope energy math.
Around the same time, Yamasa, the company known for its delicious soy sauces, released a pedometer called the manpo-kei (万歩計)—which literally translates to “10,000 steps meter.” The number wasn’t precise. But it was motivational, and so it stuck.
(*Reading through the article again, I’m getting all kinds of red flags that the author used AI. It’s got that cadence: Not this, not that. Just this. A statement–with something that sounds deep added to it. A string of phrases, and a weirdly emotional verb. Blech! So take all of this with a grain of salt, I guess.)