10,000 steps was a marketing number. 7,000 is the data.

The 10,000-step target began life as the name of a Japanese pedometer in the 1960s — manpo-kei, the ten-thousand-step meter — and has survived sixty years on the strength of being a round number. Today a team led by Melody Ding at the University of Sydney published in Lancet Public Health the largest review of device-measured steps and health outcomes yet, drawing on 57 studies. Compared with 2,000 steps a day, 7,000 was associated with a 47% lower relative risk of death from any cause, 25% lower cardiovascular disease, 38% lower dementia, 22% fewer depressive symptoms and 28% fewer falls. Above 7,000, the gains for most outcomes flattened. The authors' message: 10,000 is fine if you are already active, and 7,000 is a realistic target for many.

Read the shape, not the number. The curve in this paper is steepest at the bottom. Going from 2,000 to 4,000 steps was associated with a 36% lower relative risk of death — most of the benefit of going all the way to 7,000. These are observational studies, and the review was publicly funded by Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council; the authors rate the certainty of evidence low to moderate. They cannot prove that walking causes the difference. What they show, consistently, is where the difference lives: in the first few thousand steps a sedentary person adds, not in the last few thousand an active one does.

Loree’s take

The people who ask me whether 7,000 or 10,000 is correct are already at 9,000. The people this paper is for are at 2,500 and have been told that anything short of 10,000 does not count, so they have not started. The data says the opposite: the first thousand steps you add are the most valuable ones you will ever take. Start there, and stop counting as soon as the habit holds.

Ben’s take

The old number was a product name. Watch the new one become a product too — the 7,000-step ring setting, the 7,000-step challenge, the app that charges to tell you what this free paper just did. The number was never the point. The curve was. Nobody can sell you a curve.

Why it matters to a recovering optimizer. This is the strongest version of a finding the movement chapter of the book we are writing rests on: the biggest gains come from the transition between sedentary and minimally active, and consistency beats optimization. Today's review adds dementia, depression and falls to the list of things that move at the low end of the curve. It is good news for almost everyone, and best for the people who thought they had failed by not reaching a number a pedometer company invented.