10,000 Steps Is a Marketing Number, Not a Science Number
If you wear a watch or a band, you know the picture: it’s eleven at night, you’re two thousand steps short, so you walk laps around your building. The watch sets off fireworks and you feel like you’ve done your duty for the day. That number — 10,000 — you’ve assumed is a scientific standard. It isn’t. It was a slogan invented in 1965 by a Japanese clock company to sell pedometers, and at the time there was no research behind it at all. The science only got bolted on decades later. ...