Most of us are familiar with the idea that you need to take 10 thousand steps per day to stay healthy but getting to this magic number is not that easy. The 10,000-step target first became popular in Japan in the 1960s.

A clockmaker capitalising on people's new interest in fitness following the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games made a pedometer with a name that, when written in Japanese characters, resembled a walking man and coincidentally translated as “10,000-steps metre.” A study of over 78,000 people in the UK between 2013 and 2015 using wearable trackers was published in the journals JAMA Internal Medicine and JAMA Neurology.

Where did we get the number 10 thousand from? Does that mean that we do not need to take 10 steps? So how many steps should I be aiming for per day? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions!

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A podcast written and realised by Amber Minogue.

First broadcast: 19/1/2023

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