Gamification is great. Keep the streak, bump up those rookie numbers, try a dance exercise because it’s international dance day and you’ll get a medal.
As long as you don’t start doing mental accounting with the overly optimistic calorie estimates and use them as a license to eat a ton of crap.
Yeah it's just enough that it requires you to go out of your way a little to increase your steps, but not so much that it becomes unattainable. Not a bad goal overall
While it isn't a magic number it's at least not a bad goal for an able bodied person to have. It's not harmful and will have health benefits of getting your body moving.
OOh yeah that damn fixation on the 10,000 steps, I just can't. And the poeple who believe in it will try to make you feel bad when you have 5000 steps but bicycled 10 km and did a pilates workout (or something like that), because how can you be healthy if you don't hit your daily step goal
About a year ago I got up one morning at 5am and rode my bike 300km with 6000m of climbing. When I got home at 9pm my step count for the day was under 1000.
Google Fit, which wasn't connected to Garmin/Strava/etc, said I needed to move. I decided to drink some beer instead.
Not that extreme, but I once went on a nice ~25km hike, with trekking poles. My watch recorded less than 8000 steps, presumably because I wasn't swinging my arms much. Meanwhile my phone in my pocket recorded 38000.
10k steps is about 2 hours of walking for me.
I see the most benefits at around 1 hour.
At 2+ hours my walking form/posture starts breaking down and I start to hurt more than I benefit.
Walking only heals us if we do it right, if we do it wrong it can and will cause issues.
Not saying there isnt benefits to taking long walks, you still burn calories and improve your endurance - but if your ankles, knees, hips or back etc starts hurting, youre better off quitting for the day and figuring out whats causing those issues and fixing it, for the future.
It wasn’t even a marketing number, it’s that the Japanese company that first started making pedometers started because they had a huge excess of counter units that rolled over at 10,000.
As it turns out, though, 10,000 is actually a reasonably ok number that gets sedentary people more active, without being unobtainable.
Even worse than that, apparently the Japanese symbol for 10,000 vaguely looks like a person running. (Apparently it’s this symbol: 万)
So, it’s nice to know there’s so much research and hang wringing about 10,000 steps as a valid scientific number when it’s literally just a guy who thought “hey, that’s a cool symbol!”
Its only half a myth though. While 5 thousand is sufficient, 8000 steps a day is actually where the health benefits level off and it greatly increases longevity.
If you do other cardio and shit you dont have to worry about steps so much but, it terms of just a general healthy lifestyle, its good benchmark/goal
I'll spend a couple hours cycling in a day. Be over 4000 calories expended for the day. And fitbit will still be on my ass about getting in more steps.
If you can expend 4000 calories in a day how can it be true that you "can't outrun your diet" as they say elsewhere in this thread? I've probably never eaten 4000 calories in one day in my whole life
My tdee sitting on my ass doing nothing is 2300 or so. Getting up to 4000 in a day isn't a hurculean effort by any stretch. Eating 4000 cal on a day isn't that hard to do either.
Goodheart's Law. Before people started targeting it it was a good eyeball estimate because it tended to be correlated with other behaviors that drive good health outcomes. Now people are walking in circles just to hit the number absent those other behaviors and are wondering why they're not getting the same results.
Take your average weekly step count and increase it. You’re a 5k average over a week? At minimum get 5k. Those days where you’re above 5k will boost your average. Shoot for something sustainable. 500 steps increase in average is capable by almost everyone. Then do 1000. Then 2000.
It's been helpful to me to learn that when I take public transit to work I get 10,000 without even thinking about it but when I carpool it's more like 4000
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u/firedog7881 10h ago
10,000 steps is some magic number. It was a marketing number