Italy's walkable cities expose the 10,000-step myth

A health journalist who moved from suburban California to Florence, Italy, saw her daily step count jump from 3,500 to 8,000 without any effort. Some days she hit 15,000 to 20,000 steps just living a normal urban life. The shift – from car-dependent errands to walking her daughter to school, running to the market, meeting friends for a cappuccino on foot – made her stop wearing a step tracker entirely.

Her experience highlights a tension at the heart of the wearable-device boom. The 10,000-step target is a marketing artifact from a 1965 Japanese pedometer campaign, not a scientific threshold. The device was called Manpo-kei, which translates to "10,000 steps meter." No studies backed the number at launch.

Since then, researchers have tested the relationship between steps and health outcomes. A 2019 study found that women who walked 4,400 steps a day had significantly lower mortality rates than those averaging 2,700 steps. The women in the study had a median age of 72. A 2025 analysis pegged the meaningful risk-reduction zone at 5,000 to 7,000 steps per day.

"The effect of 10,000 steps on you might be different from me," Daniel Lieberman, a professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, told the journalist.

The tracking culture around step counts can become counterproductive. Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist in New York, said he has seen patients become anxious about falling short of 7,500 steps in a day. "For some people, counting steps or monitoring sleep encourages healthier habits," Alpert said. "For others, it turns into a form of self-surveillance where every number starts to feel like a judgment."

Alpert described the obsession with health metrics as a reflection of a deeper cultural pattern – people seeking external validation to understand themselves internally, and grasping for control in an unpredictable world. "Health data can create the feeling that if we just track enough information, we can perfect ourselves and eliminate risk," he said. "But human beings aren't spreadsheets, and not everything important can be measured."

Walking for its own sake, without a tracker, carries its own benefits. Alpert called it "calming, restorative, and even meditative" and said it "allows people to be present rather than constantly evaluating their performance."

The journalist now goes weeks without checking her step count. In Florence, she said, she tries not to look at her phone at all. She looks up at the architecture and walks to the sound of church bells. "It's a moment for me to get lost in my own thoughts while moving my body, which is better for my health than judging myself for not reaching yet another artificial health metric."

The read-through for the stock market analysis sector is straightforward. The companies that sell wearables and health-tracking subscriptions – Apple (AAPL) with its Watch, the broader fitness-device ecosystem – have built their growth thesis partly on the idea that quantified movement drives engagement and upgrade cycles. If a meaningful share of users decides the tracker is the problem, not the solution, churn risk rises. But the larger point from the urban-design side is more durable: cities that force walking produce more steps than any wearable can motivate. That is a structural advantage for walkable urban markets, and a structural headwind for car-dependent suburban markets, regardless of what the device industry does next.