For three years I looked at my wrist every evening to check whether the ring had closed. On some days I went round the block again at half past ten because I was four hundred steps short. Four hundred. In the rain.
At some point I looked up where the 10,000 figure comes from. The answer annoyed me more than I expected.
The number is marketing
It almost certainly originates in Japan in the 1960s. A manufacturer launched a pedometer whose name translates roughly as "10,000-step meter." The figure sounded good, the Japanese character for 10,000 happens to resemble a walking person, and the device sold.
There was no study behind it. No recommendation from any medical body. It was a product name.
What's remarkable is how durable it has been. It appears in fitness apps, corporate wellness programmes, magazine articles. Millions of people organise their days around it, and the origin is a marketing decision from six decades ago.
What the research actually shows
The more recent work on this is genuinely interesting. Several large observational studies have examined the relationship between daily step count and mortality, and the picture is more consistent than you might expect.
The greatest benefit sits at the lower end. Going from around 2,000 steps a day to 4,000 or 5,000 produces a clear effect. Going from 7,000 to 10,000 produces much less.
In many of these studies the curve flattens somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 steps, and in older participants sometimes earlier. More doesn't hurt, but the additional return gets small.
Put differently: the people who would benefit most from additional movement are those who move very little. And those are precisely the people a target that looks unreachable is more likely to discourage than motivate.
What the watch didn't tell me
The bigger problem for me was something else. Step count measures volume, not quality.
A slow amble round a supermarket counts the same as a brisk walk. Yet intensity, as far as anyone can tell, matters at least as much as volume. Walking briskly enough to be slightly out of breath does something quite different to the cardiovascular system than strolling.
And anything that doesn't produce steps is invisible. Cycling barely registers. Swimming not at all. Strength training, which matters enormously for older people in particular, generates essentially zero steps.
I knew someone who left their bike at home and walked instead, because the app rated it better. That's a behaviour change caused by the measurement, and physically it was no improvement at all.
The psychological part
What eventually convinced me to stop wasn't the physiology. It was noticing that the number had changed my relationship with walking.
A walk stopped being a walk and became a task with a counter attached. On days I didn't hit the target I felt vaguely guilty — over a completely arbitrary figure somebody invented for a product name.
There's a concept in motivation research about external rewards displacing intrinsic motivation. If you take something you enjoy for its own sake and attach it to an external metric, the enjoyment can decline. That's more or less exactly what happened to me.
What I do instead
Before that, one thing I noticed that I have not seen written down anywhere. The step count changed which walks I chose, not just how many. I started preferring long flat routes over shorter hilly ones, because flat ground produces more steps per minute. That is precisely backwards — the hill is the part that does something for your cardiovascular system, and the metric was quietly steering me away from it.
The same logic applies to almost every single-number fitness target. A metric that is easy to measure gets optimised, and whatever is hard to measure gets neglected, regardless of which one actually matters. That is not a criticism of the people who build these devices. It is just what happens when you attach a score to a behaviour.
There is also the question of what happens on a bad week. Illness, a heavy stretch at work, a small injury. A tracker records that as failure, in colour, every single day. What it cannot record is that resting was the correct decision. Over a long enough period that mismatch wears on people, and I think it is one reason so many of these devices end up in drawers.
Nothing original, but it works better for me.
I walk for twenty minutes in the morning before doing anything else. Not measured, no watch, just twenty minutes. If it turns into more, it turns into more.
I take the stairs by default, which has become automatic and costs no willpower at all anymore.
And I pay more attention to how I feel after a week than to what an app shows me in the evening. That's vaguer and considerably more honest.
Who trackers still make sense for
I don't want to overstate this. There are people for whom these devices genuinely work, and the research isn't uniformly negative — pedometers do increase actual movement for many people, at least over several months.
Anyone who moves very little and needs a prompt will benefit. Anyone who enjoys collecting data and draws motivation from it, likewise. And in rehabilitation, where controlled increases in load matter, they're a real tool.
What I doubt is the number. If you want a target, take 7,000 rather than 10,000 — it's better supported, more achievable, and the difference in health benefit is small.
And if you find yourself walking round the block in the dark to complete a figure a marketing team invented in the sixties, that might be the moment to put the watch away. Mine has been in a drawer for over a year now, and I don't move less than I did. Just more calmly.