In the 1960s, professor Yoshiro Hatano invented the 10,000 step rule after he became interested in figuring out the most impactful method for preventing heart disease and obesity.
Hatano theorised that taking 10,000 steps a day, the equivalent of about five miles, would result in 20 percent of burned calories for the average person. The idea spread to the U.S. and other countries and became the recommended health standard in several organisations.

History of the 10,000 step rule

Health

Everyone's activity needs are different depending on their fitness goals. On average, inactive people will take about 5,000 steps per day, active people between 7,500 and 10,000 steps and very active people over 12,500 steps per day. Determine your fitness goals:<ul><li>Track how many steps you naturally achieve per day using a fitness tracker, then increase your daily steps goal using a realistic timeline.</li><li>Listen to your body. Doing too much too soon can leave you sore, overly tired, or injured.</li></ul>

Setting your unique step goal

Walk, walk, and keep on walking. There are many ways to get short and long walks into your day.<ul><li>Try parking farther from the grocery store than usual.</li><li>March in place between Zoom meetings.</li><li>Get off the subway a stop earlier and walk home.</li><li>Choose the stairs over the escalator.</li><li>Take your dog on a longer stroll.</li></ul> Doing 300 minutes of brisk walking a week will be similar to 150 minutes of light-to-moderate intensity exercise. That is only 45 minutes of walking a day.

How to get your steps in

Here's what you need to know about this important fitness number, from how many calories 10,000 steps burns, how many miles it is, and whether you really should be hitting it every day.

Why 10,000 Steps? Here's Where This Daily Fitness Goal Comes From-and Whether It's Worth Following

It is a well-known fact that exercise is beneficial for our health and well-being. It also lowers blood pressure, improves our sleep and leads to better glycemic control.
New research on exercise reveals that group exercising may have other positive effects that were overlooked before. Our thoughts and attitudes are influenced by the people around us, and when we get to know people who exercise regularly, we start to view the activity as desirable, doable and appealing.

The Benefits Of Exercise And Social Aspects

If the motivation we have to exercise is intrinsic (coming from our inner being), we are more likely to continue with the behaviour or activity, as it is both enjoyable and satisfying by itself. If the motivation is extrinsic (an obligation or just to lose weight) it becomes difficult to maintain the same.
Group exercise is enjoyable and rewarding even if it is difficult. The social aspect turns the otherwise boring and monotonous activity into fun.

The Motivation Of Friends

<ul>
<li>Social exercise provides a sense of autonomy, making us feel more self-reliant.</li>
<li>It increases connectedness with others and promotes better mental health.</li>
<li>It makes the process easy and habit-forming, with your friends becoming both your cue and your reward for your actions.</li>
<li>When one sees others sweating hard, it provides a raw motivation and renewed confidence, making you go the extra mile. This would not be possible alone.</li>
<li>Friends provide reminders and regular doses of encouragement, helping us stay on track.</li>
<li>It is easier and more fun to travel with friends to the gym.</li>
<li>Friendly challenges and competition boost the intensity of our effort.</li>
<li>Exercising can become a life-long habit due to the social aspects.</li>
<li>Social exercising results in people attending regular sessions, coming on time and not dropping out in between.</li>
</ul>

Benefits Of Group Exercise

The pandemic has severely affected social exercising, but there are few ways out. Several yoga classes have participants at safe distance from each other, and there are many running clubs where people wear masks.
Virtual classes for Yoga or aerobics are the next-best thing and offer several new benefits like flexibility of schedule and connecting with people all over the world.

Group Exercising And The Pandemic

Your most important piece of exercise gear may be the friends you buddy up with to work out.

Group exercise may be even better for you than solo workouts – here's why

Whenever you move to do stuff, that&#39;s physical activity. Exercise, however, is a voluntary physical activity that one undertakes for the sake of fitness.
Exercise is a modern behavior. Humans, for many ages, were only physically active when it was necessary or when it&#39;s rewarding. Gathering food among other survival activities are considered necessary while playing, dancing, and developing skills, are rewarding.

Myth: It's normal to exercise

Our ancestors evolved to avoid needless exertion so don&#39;t feel too bad about the natural instincts we still carry. Learn to accept that it is a natural behavior and that it is difficult to overcome it.
Physical activity costs us calories and up until recently, we were always short of supply. Back in time, food was limited and every calorie spent on physical activity was a calorie not spend on critical functions like body maintenance, storing energy, or even reproducing.

Myth: Avoiding exertion means you are lazy

Let us not demonize normal behavior. It is true that too much physical inactivity is unhealthy, but sitting is not as bad as people make it out to be. It is only leisure-time sitting that is strongly associated with negative health outcomes rather than work-time sitting.
Those who sit actively by getting up every other 15 minutes and so wake up their metabolisms and enjoy better long-term health than those who don&#39;t.

Myth: Sitting is the new smoking

Our ancestors&#39; lives were certainly not easy, but they were not super-strong or super-fast. Most of them were reasonably fit for hunter-gatherers, but they were moderately strong and not especially fast.
On the average our ancestors only spent 2 to 3 hours a day doing moderate-to-vigorous physical activities.

Myth: Our ancestors were hard-working, strong, and fast

Every diet benefits from including exercise into the routine.
You can lose more weight much faster through diet rather than exercise. However, for longer durations and higher intensities of exercise, it has been shown to promote gradual weight loss.

Myth: You can't lose weight walking

Running, walking, and other activities have been proven to keep knees healthy. Knees and other joints aren&#39;t car shock absorbers that wear out over time with use. If anything, you&#39;re less likely to develop knee osteoarthritis with running.
The main solution to avoiding knee pain is to learn how to run properly and train sensibly.

Myth: Running will wear out your knees

We all evolved to be grandparents to be able to provide food for our children and grandchildren.
Exercising and staying physically active as we grow older actually stimulates myriad repair and maintenance processes that keep our bodies groovy. Plenty of studies claim that exercise is healthier the older we get.

Myth: It's normal to be less active as we age

Many medical professionals follow the World Health Organization&#39;s recommendation of at least 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise for adults.
However, their recommendation is only an arbitrary prescription because the exercise an individual need depends on many factors such as age, injury history, and other health concerns.
Regardless, no matter how unfit you are, even a little exercise goes a long way and it&#39;s better than none.

Myth: There is an optimal dose of exercise

A lot of people don&#39;t like to exercise because they have natural tendencies to avoid it and it&#39;s hard to overcome.
To promote exercise we must make it a necessity and a rewarding activity. A way to accomplish this is to make exercise a social activity, where you&#39;ll be obliged to show up and you&#39;ll have fun but still be held accountable.

Myth: The 'Just do it' approach works

The absence of physical activity makes us vulnerable to many illnesses, both physical and mental.
Exercising is not a magic bullet that guarantees good health for every person who chooses to exercise but doing so slows the rate of aging and substantially reduces your chances of getting a wide range of diseases.

Myth: Exercise is a magic bullet

We all believe we should exercise more. So why is it so hard to keep it up? Daniel E Lieberman, Harvard professor of evolutionary biology, explodes the most common and unhelpful workout myths

Just don’t do it: 10 exercise myths

Our lifestyles have since then changed and in order to adjust to our environment, there are things that we cannot do at the moment like go to the gym.
The good news is that you don&#39;t need to go to the gym in order to exercise at home.

Exercising At Home

In order to make this habit a long-lasting one, we must be able to take into account the level of where we are starting. We can do this by:
<ul>
<li>Downloading an exercise app or watching online workouts. Having a personalized smartwatch is optional, but studies show that it is helpful to have one.</li>
<li>Finding enough space at home to work out. A space that&#39;s tall enough for us to stand in and long enough to lie down in.</li>
</ul>

Starting An At-Home Exercising Habit

There is no &#39;best exercise,&#39; only the best exercise that is suited for us. In order to figure out the best kind of exercise for us is that it needs to be able to hit these three requirements:
<ol>
<li>The exercise is considerate of our time</li>
<li>The intensity of our exercise or how hard you want to work; and</li>
<li>If we enjoy doing the exercise.</li>
</ol>
It doesn&#39;t have to be complicated. We have preferences but when we&#39;re at the starting point, we need to remember that this habit is for our long-term satisfaction.

The 'Best Exercise'

In order to keep ourselves motivated, we must set a goal that is achievable. For a habit to stick it must be easy enough for us to fulfill.
It&#39;s like aiming to exercise twice a week because it shows a comparatively similar improvement to those who train 3x a week or wanting to be able to jog for 10 minutes straight without stopping. Always start small and build up incrementally.
Tell your friends and family about your goal so that they can help you prise off of the sofa during your &quot;off-days.&quot;

Home Workouts: Staying Motivated

It&#39;s really difficult to get a six-pack, but never impossible, in order to do this you need good nutrition and low levels of body fat.
Make sure to eat well and perform long low-intensity cardiovascular exercises.

A Healthy Diet And A Six Pack

Due to the coronavirus, more people are exercising indoors. This month, we ask exercise researchers Matt Cocks and Katie Hesketh how to get fit at home.

How to get fit at home (and the mistakes to avoid): A scientist’s guide

We all know exercise is good for us but we don&#39;t do it. A 2018 survey showed that 50 percent of adults and 73 percent of high school students report that they don&#39;t meet the minimum levels of physical activity.
We realise that much of the health industry gives conflicting advice on how much exercise we need, what kind, and how to get motivated.

We don't exercise, even if we know it is good for us

Humans were meant to move but not to be active for no reason. 
When you study modern hunter-gatherer tribes, you see them sitting around a lot, doing nothing. They do move a lot, but that is because they have to. They are about as fit as modern people who exercise an hour a day.

Exercise isn't natural - neither is being sedentary

Many of the health problems we attribute to ageing are due to modern behaviours and lifestyles. They are a mismatch between how we were designed to live and how we really do.
<ul>
<li>Type 2 diabetes was almost unheard of in the hunter-gatherers, yet it is the fastest growing disease in the modern world.</li>
<li>Before WW2, heart attacks were not a big issue. Medical science hardly felt the need to study them.</li>
<li>An Italian study showed that between 1760 and 1839, less than one percent died from cancer.</li>
</ul>

Many diseases are due to modern behaviors

Research shows that runners sit as much as less athletic people. Another study of Danes found no association between time spent sitting and heart disease.
But leisure-time sitting predicts mortality, suggesting that exercise habits in the mornings, evenings, and weekends affect our health. That means we should combine our exercise with occasionally getting up from the chair.

The problem is not too much sitting

Studies show that in the vast majority of cases, more exercise is better.
<ul>
<li>There is a 30 percent reduction in mortality in individuals who exercise one hour a week compared to sedentary individuals.</li>
<li>People who exercise three hours a week lower their risk of death by another 10 percent.</li>
<li>Those who engage in 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week and weight train twice a week will reduce their risk of premature death by 50 percent.</li>
</ul>

How much exercise is enough

Motivation for getting moving comes down to two things: A good reason to move and to socialise.
<ul>
<li>Consider a sport, or learn a skill like martial arts or dancing. Once you have a goal, it is not pointless and can even be fun.</li>
<li>For activities like going to the gym, do it with something rewarding like listening to audiobooks or podcasts.</li>
</ul>

A simple way to start exercising

If you're going to lead a long, awesome life you need to exercise. Here's what science has to say about the best way to do it...

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History of the 10,000 step rule

Why 10,000 Steps? Here's Where This Daily Fitness Goal Comes From-and Whether It's Worth Following

The Benefits Of Exercise And Social Aspects

Group exercise may be even better for you than solo workouts – here's why