Is 10000 steps per day too much for the average person?

Uh... I think they are including walking around during actual life, not just when working out.

Soooo... Like when the office worker gets out of bed, walks to the dumper, cannot go, curses out loud, takes a coffee enema and finally squeezes out a dry, coarse, little ball. All the walking during that litle escapade gets counted towards the 10,000. As do the steps to and fro the starbucks for their 5,000 calorie venti milkshakes, twice a day (Wanna grab a coffee?!).

ICP baby, for LIFE!~!!!

Maybe the 10000 step per day program was well-intentioned, but whoever thought of it needs a serious math or reality check. From:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:ESu5Bnr_U7oJ:www.pbs.org/americaswalking/health/health20percentboost.html+10000+steps&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

"The goal of taking 10,000 steps in a day is a rough equivalent to the Surgeon General's recommendation to accumulate 30 minutes of activity most days of the week."

Hell no! 30 minutes of activity per day is reasonable for the Average Joe, but you'd need to take 11 strides every 2 seconds if you want to complete 10000 steps in half an hour. Even elite sprinters can't match that stride rate for just a few seconds.

You're kidding right?

KayWoodia wrote:

Uh... I think they are including walking around during actual life, not just when working out.

That contribution would probably negligible, though. Doing daily chores and going to work won't add up to more than a mile for most people, and that gets you at most 2000 steps.

seems excessive wrote:

That contribution would probably negligible

"would *be* probably negligible"

So your saying you have never worn a pedometer for a full day and you have nothing to base this off of except for the one hour you were running with a pedometer on? I am a college runner on a small campus and for a class I wore a pedometer for two months. On average, days I wouldn't run I was in the 12,000 steps range. That is without even 30 minutes of physical exercise. Days I would run were topping 20,000. from one end of my campus to the other is less than a half mile so I don't think I was walking a ridiculous distance ever compared to what people should be or can feasibly walk.

College Student wrote:

I am a college runner on a small campus and for a class I wore a pedometer for two months. On average, days I wouldn't run I was in the 12,000 steps range. That is without even 30 minutes of physical exercise.

Get your pedometer checked; I don't believe this. The average person's stride length while walking is about 2 and a half feet, so 12000+ steps would be 5-6 miles.

You're telling me that you usually walk 5-6 miles a day? That's BS unless you're Amish or something.

10,000 steps per day, assuming thirteen hours out of bed a day (maybe a lowball estimate), requires an average of almost 13 steps per minute for the entire thirteen hours. But if walking pace is probably two steps per second, then 10,000 steps would be about an hour and a half of walking.

big 5 wrote:

College Student wrote:

I am a college runner on a small campus and for a class I wore a pedometer for two months. On average, days I wouldn't run I was in the 12,000 steps range. That is without even 30 minutes of physical exercise.

Get your pedometer checked; I don't believe this. The average person's stride length while walking is about 2 and a half feet, so 12000+ steps would be 5-6 miles.

You're telling me that you usually walk 5-6 miles a day? That's BS unless you're Amish or something.

Agreed, I wear a pedometer for a program sponsored by my company. We get reimbursed for accumulating steps for the year to promote an active lifestyle. I run at least 5 miles most days of the week and usually end up at around 12,000 steps a day. No run and I am at 3 - 4000 steps. (office job keeps me in a cubicle). But if I am out walking around doing yard work or something I can get a lot of steps in without covering 5 miles. My running stride is much longer than my walking stride so I don't accumulate as many steps when running a longer distance.

If you want to know how far you travel in a given day use a GPS, a pedometer only measures steps.

On busy days in the running store, I can walk anywhere from 3-5 miles. 10,000 is not really a high number. People standards are lowered. When I work at my office job, however, I bet I walk less than a mile.

Daniels and others recommend a cadence of about 180 strides per minute while running, so in 30 minutes, that

would be only 5400 steps; or about half-way to the goal.

(Did I use that hyphen right? Now I'm self-conscious about them.)

Movie critic Roger Ebert, when he was on a weight losing kick, wore a pedometer and talked to Jay Leno on The Tonight Show about aiming for 10,000 steps a day every day. If that old fat guy could do it (and he did it ever day) then it is not too much. I think it likely requires some extra walking for fitness, making sure to walk around a bit during the day if you have a desk job, etc., but again, if he could do it, it's VERY doable.

seems excessive wrote:

I borrowed my friend's pedometer for a 9 mile run today, and it said that I only took 9,880 steps. I only ran it at a 7:30/mile pace, so it wasn't fast by any standard. Also, I'm pretty sure that the pedometer was accurate since I've measured that a stride averages just under 5 feet for me (I jogged along the football field and counted the steps. 300 feet/61 steps = 4.9 feet/stride).

Are you sure that's right? 7:30 per mile for 9 miles is 67:30. 9880 strides in that time comes out to about 146 strides per minute. That's really slow, especially for someone running 7:30 miles.

OldXCguy wrote:

Daniels and others recommend a cadence of about 180 strides per minute while running . . .

My understanding is that walking cadence about 120 per minute for a brisk walk, so 10000/120 = 83 minutes. Running would be 10000/180 = 56 minutes. The flaw in the original poster's reasoning is converting this to miles at his running pace and presuming that the recommendation is to go that distance. The average Joe walking 20 minute miles will get 10000 steps in about 4 miles of walking. While this is not an unreasonable goal, I expect only a small minority of Americans achieve it. It seems plausible that a student walking between to and around campus could do this routinely.

I know I smash the 10000 steps per day. I walk a good 2 hours a day mon-fri through walking to school and practice and back several times. I will put in some 8-10 mile days a few times a quarter if I plan poorly and go grocery shopping or something like that. But less than 5 is rare. Put that on top of 70-75 miles a week. I take a whole lot of steps. I know I am not normal, but I bet lots of college kids in a city walk 5-6 miles per day, without any effort

You guys, hi. I know this is old, but it came up on the first page of googling when I was looking for "how many running steps per mile" & I found the raw data I need, but I feel compelled to clarify for others who may land here:

The original poster states that he ran 9-ish miles for just under the 10k steps benchmark & how can this be a goal for office worker ? But the original poster *also* states that his step-length on this run is abt 5 feet.. With 5000-ish feet per mile, that makes the 9m run abt 10k steps. So far, so good.

Walkers/shufflers/errand-runners aren't taking giant-equine, 5-foot strides to walk around, not even if they're trying to catch a train.

Who are "they" and why should anyone take their recommendations seriously? One's fitness level is not a product of the number of steps taken per day. 10,000 is nothing more than an arbitrary round number generated by a panel of government "experts" who don't know the first thing about exercise.

Fitness has nothing to do with the number of steps taken per day. 30 minutes of high intensity weight training per week is much more beneficial than walking 70,000 steps in the same period. Alone, walking 10,000 steps per day is probably of no value.

I wear a Nike Fuelband and I walk around 10000 to 12000 steps everyday. That is what they recommend and believe me, its not hard. I am an average office worker and most of the time I am in office chair. What I do is park little far, so when I get to office, I pick some steps, on lunch I pick some and when I get off, I pick some, it just comes out to that number.