What age person is the data based on? i.e. walking steps, etc

[daisyduck]

What age person and gender is the recommended data based on?  i.e. 10,000 steps.

[Odyssey13]

daisyduck, I think it's just a general recommendation based on what doctors and physical therapists suggest. 10,000 steps is approximately five miles, depending on a person's stride.

You don't have to keep the goal of that many steps. It can be adjusted to the number of steps you prefer to have by clicking on the gear icon of the step tile and putting in the numbers you prefer.

[gerrymcd · Accepted solution]

'10,000 steps a day'  was first proposed in 1960 when a Japanese research group discovered most people only take 3,500 to 5,000 steps per day.  Based on this number they concluded people would be leaner and healthier if they increased this number to 10,000.  

Consequently, the notion of 10,000 steps is advice to people in general, and takes no account of age, health, fitness, etc.  Its more a call to be mindful of activity levels and a number to aim for, rather than a hard and fast rule.   That said, for most people taking 10,000 steps equates to walking 5 miles and burning 500 calories - which equates to burning of our 25% caloric intake by activity.  Which is also good to keep our metabolism ticking over nicely. 

[Odyssey13]

Thanks, gerrymcd. Now since that was close to fifty years ago, you'd think someone will be doing a new study.

[gerrymcd]

There have been more recent studies - but they all pretty much come to the same conclusion (ie 10,000 is the average value, but they were a bit more specific: 8,000 steps for women over 60, 12,000 for men aged 18-50).  But, like I said these are very general targets.  There are a lot of 60 year old women for whom 8,000 is easy, and a lot of 18 year olds who would stuggle badly to get past 4,000.  

I think the conclusion to all of these studies is the same 'people  in general need to be more active, but not a huge amount more'.  Once we go past a certain amount of activity every day there is not much health benefit'