Could I do 10,000 steps a day for 100 days?

Back in May I decided to set myself a challenge to complete 10,000 steps a day for 100 days. I'm notoriously bad at long term challenges like this (this explains my habit of not training properly for marathon running!).

Why 10,000 steps? The original 10,000 was actually a marketing campaign in the 60s from a Japanese company to sell pedometers. Surprisingly there has been little research to assess the health benefits of doing 10,000 steps a day. Research that has been conducted has been inconclusive, some studies have reported no difference, a study from Harvard (women only) showed that any benefits plateaued after 7,500 daily steps. (Link to study below)

For the terms of my challenge I decided that the arbitrary number of 10,000 was a good one to aim for. It equates to roughly 5 miles in total or a 3 mile walk and general ‘life’ steps, and is possible but certainly not easy to obtain every day.

I started with my usual enthusiasm to face a challenge head on, this is probably the hardest physical challenge I’ve set myself - 100 days is a long time! As you can see from the table below I didn’t make 100%. Technically I failed the challenge. But I'm not going to beat myself up over it- I made 63 days (that first yellow was a day when I forgot to check and I was 176 steps short so I'm giving myself a break over that one!)

How did I do? Day 1 top left then left to right until day 100 bottom right.

Green = 10,000+, yellow- 9000+, Orange 7000-9000 and Red under 7000.

Like everyone I have bad days, thankfully it doesn’t happen often but day 64 was one of them. I didn't want to go out and I discovered that it's pretty much impossible to complete 10,000 steps without leaving the house! The next day I managed to get out and do a bit but I lost my mojo a little after that and ended up missing a few days.

I was tempted to quit once I missed a day but I carried on recording my steps and I made the 10,000 for 90% of days. I reached at least 70,000 steps every week so I did complete an average of 10,000 a day- I'll take that as a kind of success.

The challenge was a good one, I'd recommend trying it yourself but 100 days is a long time and so think about the compliance rate that would make you happy. Also look at how many steps you tend to take anyway and choose your goal from there, it maybe that you do 5000 steps most days already so an extra 2500 is more appropriate for you. Happy walking!!