Bend in the Walk

The Arbitrary Target

Mara: Marisa Cohen spent twelve years watching her mother decline from Alzheimer's disease. Her vibrant mom, as Cohen wrote in Prevention magazine. After her mother died, Cohen said she was eager to do whatever she needed to avoid a similar fate. So she picked a number. Not the famous one. Seven thousand steps, every day, for two weeks, to see if she could reap the purported benefits.

Eli: Which is the listener's question, nearly word for word: whether the famous ten thousand is really needed, or whether something closer to Cohen's number does the job. Today's angle is the trail behind a daily step target.

Mara: It was a test she ran on herself. Two weeks long, fitted around a job and a dog.

Eli: Seven thousand sounds modest. Until it meets an ordinary week.

Mara: Her ordinary week was lopsided. On days at home she was out several times, running errands and walking her dog, Ginny, who, Cohen says, loves a good stroll even more than she does. Those days took care of themselves. Office days were the problem. Desk to restroom and back was about it. And the famous target? Depending on stride, the British Heart Foundation puts it at almost five miles. Walked in one go, most people need between one and two hours.

Eli: Every day, stacked on a desk job?

Mara: Every single day, desk days included. That's the burden Cohen was sizing her test against.

Eli: And that burden didn't start with a study. Around 1965, a Japanese pedometer, a little device that counts steps, went on sale as the manpo-kei. The name means ten-thousand-steps meter. It was a marketing campaign. One voice quoted in The Guardian put it bluntly: "The round number was easy to remember and the idea caught on, despite there being no scientific evidence for 10,000 steps as a specific threshold for health." Catchy isn't the same as measured.

Mara: Which leaves Cohen's number up against a sales slogan rather than a medical rule. Whether walking that much less really holds off chronic disease and early death is still wide open.

The Plateau on the Graph

Eli: That's where the long studies come in. One early clue came in 2019, from a study led by I-Min Lee that followed older women. At the start, none of them had heart disease or cancer. Their steps were measured, then the years went by. Death risk fell as daily steps climbed, up to about seventy-five hundred. Then the line went flat.

Mara: Just past where Cohen had set her own bar.

Eli: And it wasn't a one-off. Across studies, risk drops steepest up to roughly six to eight thousand steps a day. Past that, it's diminishing returns: ten thousand still came out ahead of lower counts. Just by less.

Mara: Cohen, meanwhile, was finding steps wherever she could. Wednesdays she worked from home, so she and a friend went on an hour-long power walk, usually around six thousand steps before 9 a.m. One Tuesday, with the New York snow starting to melt, she took the subway to an appointment about a mile from her office. She came up into a blast of sunshine she hadn't seen for months, and decided to walk back. Midday walks like that, she found, perked her up and kept her going through the afternoon.

Eli: That's most of her daily target done before the workday starts.

Mara: Then came day six, and a snowstorm. She got one decent walk in that morning, before the brunt of it. Later, no one, as she put it, "not even Ginny," wanted to go back out. She could have made up the steps with a workout at home. Instead, she made hot chocolate and watched half an old season of Project Runway with her daughter.

Eli: Cohort curves are built from averages. A snow day disappears inside them.

Mara: For Cohen it didn't disappear. Missed steps, in her own words, six days in. And the early studies flatten out well below ten thousand. Whether that holds across dozens of studies, and diseases beyond the heart, is the part Eli has been digging into.

The Sweet Spot

Eli: In 2025, those dozens arrived together, in a review in The Lancet Public Health. Its comparison point was people who barely walk, around two thousand a day. Near seven thousand steps, the authors report, the risk of dying from any cause was 47 percent lower. Close to half. Going on to ten thousand barely moved that further. Seven thousand sits around the inflection point, the bend in the curve where the drop starts to slow.

Mara: So the number Cohen chose, in the shadow of her mother's illness, sits right at that bend. The old pedometer's number was never where the big drop happened.

Eli: The authors did find one more step down, though. In an extra comparison, ten thousand came with about a 10 percent lower risk of death than seven thousand.

Mara: A much smaller step than the first one. But on their numbers, a real one.

Eli: And type 2 diabetes never flattens. Its risk keeps sliding in a straight line the further people walk. It's still dropping at twelve thousand. Researchers including Emmanuel Stamatakis read the evidence that way: higher counts keep paying, especially for younger adults and for weight and metabolism.

Mara: Eli, the other reading sits on the same curves. I-Min Lee, who led that study of older women, is among those who see the gains for death and heart disease largely finished somewhere between six and eight thousand, especially in older adults. The split is over what that last stretch is worth.

Eli: Put the big analyses side by side, and seven thousand works as the practical sweet spot for a population. What isn't settled is how far the metabolic payoff keeps running in younger adults.

Mara: Detricia Woods-Meadows lived at that metabolic end. In 2022, she'd recently learned that two people she grew up with, both her age, had died, one from complications of diabetes, one from heart disease. Then came her own diagnosis. "I was scared to tears, and I knew that letting myself go further was not an option," she said. She started at about five thousand steps a day. Then she raised her target in small increments, aiming for the famous number. By June 2024, she said she was no longer prediabetic, and her bloodwork had been coming back normal.

Eli: Cohen had a full week still to walk. What that week did to her legs is something a pooled average never records.

What Counts as Enough

Mara: That next week, Cohen came back from the hot chocolate. It took, she wrote, "a little improvising and a lot of determination." Every day for the rest of the week, she cleared seven thousand. Some days, she reached fifteen thousand.

Eli: Fifteen thousand, from someone who'd set the famous target aside.

Mara: And her body noticed. The biggest physical change, she wrote, was in her legs: no cramping or heaviness on the days she'd normally sit in a chair all day. By the end, her legs felt stronger and her energy more abundant. Her conclusion was plain. For anyone with the physical ability, at least seven thousand a day is totally doable, with a little flexibility and creativity. Her two weeks landed where the evidence was heading. The 2025 review's investigators reported that roughly seven thousand steps might serve as "a practical quantitative public health target."

Eli: Australia has written a number down. Its movement guidelines, official advice that turns exercise into a daily step count people can actually check, tell adults who track steps to aim for seven thousand or more. Older adults get the same number.

Mara: The review's authors kept the top end open, too. Seven thousand might be more realistic for some, they wrote, while ten thousand can still be a viable target for people who are more active.

Eli: Steven Harridge put the shape of it plainly: "This paper shows that 7,000 steps is sufficient for reducing the risk for most diseases covered, and 10 000 steps does not confer much additional benefit." He added that further risk reduction might be possible for some diseases. Diminishing returns, mapped across a whole review.

Mara: Cohen's caveat was physical ability, though. Some people start a long way below seven thousand.

Eli: For them, a 2024 study looked at steps alongside how much people sit. Any count above about twenty-two hundred steps was linked to lower risk of death and of heart disease, whether people sat a little or a lot.

Mara: So even a heavy-sitting day isn't a lost cause on those numbers.

Eli: And half of the benefit arrived by around four thousand to forty-five hundred steps a day.

Mara: So the answer to the listener is no: ten thousand isn't required. Five to seven thousand captures most of the protection against early death and heart disease, and the steps beyond it buy less and less. Cohen started all this in the shadow of her mother's long decline, walking Ginny and chasing a number she could actually keep. It's the number Australia now prints in its guidelines.

Eli: Two things would sharpen it. Trials that test walking pace separately from the daily total. And cohort updates split by age, tracking weight and metabolism in younger adults over the long run. If those show the top of the curve paying more than it seems, ten thousand wins back some ground for some people.

Mara: For listeners wanting context on the original step target, look up Manpo-kei.

Eli: Follow health with us across more stories as daily targets evolve.

Mara: Thanks for listening. I'm Mara.

Eli: And I'm Eli. Until next time.