Why Your Daily Step Count Is a Baseline, Not a Target

5,649 steps.

Not 5,000. Not “roughly 5,500.” Five thousand, six hundred and forty-nine.

There’s some authority to a number that specific. A round number sounds like general advice—somebody picked it because it’s easy to remember. But a precise one sounds like a discovery—somebody measured something, and this was the result.

That instinct is usually right. But usually isn’t always, as you’ll see below.

Straight from the source

The number originally comes from a ​study published in 2017​ by Meghan Edwards and Paul Loprinzi at the University of Mississippi, and the design is the whole story.

They recruited 39 young adults, ages 18 to 35, who were already active. Twenty-six of them were told to stop exercising for one week and to keep their daily steps under 5,000. The other thirteen carried on as usual.

Before the restriction, the experimental group (those who were told to reduce activity) was averaging 8,475 steps a day. During the restriction week they averaged 5,649—or 5648.60, to be precise. When the week ended and they went back to normal, they climbed to 9,508. The experiment’s published results showed that they experienced greater anxiety and depression symptoms (based on a questionnaire) and a drop in both mood and life satisfaction (a decrease of 31.1% for the latter) during the reduced exercise week—and a reversal of all conditions after exercise resumed.

The main points for our purposes today are that:

• These were active people who were told to become less active for a week—and experienced noticeable mental and emotional effects when they did.
• The 5,649 step-count wasn’t a floor that was tested against but an average—with a standard deviation of 1646 (which means they ranged from about 4,000 to 7,300 steps per day)—that the group as a whole reached when asked to sit still for seven days.

Lost in translation

If the step count and life satisfaction numbers look oddly familiar, it could be because I discussed them in a past tip.

In January of 2023 I wrote ​Feeling Anxious or Depressed? Walking May Help​, built on Kelly McGonigal’s The Joy of Movement. There I lightly paraphrased her paraphrasing of this research by describing 5,649 as “the number of daily steps required to induce such feelings” (e.g. life satisfaction, mood) and comparing it to the American average of 4,774 daily steps. Then I extrapolated that the 10,000 target commonly recommended today was popular partly because it sits at a comfortable buffer above the 5,650-step “minimum.”

But that’s technically not what the study found.

It didn’t find that fewer than 5,649 steps leads to poorer mental and emotional states. Or that the average American’s 4,774 daily steps implies that poor mental and emotional states are the norm.

It did find that reducing active people’s exercise and step count leads to such states, and that those states reverse when their activity levels return to normal.

What’s worth saying plainly here is that every link in the chain that produced the tip from 2023 was made by someone acting reasonably. A study reported what it found. A book summarized it. I read the book and passed the summary along without going back to the original paper.

All of which is normal and fine—reading recently published books written by science writers or other experts is how most of us keep up with new information. Still, it’s worth remembering that primary information can easily be misinterpreted or lost in translation. (I’ve made versions of this point before, specifically about ​treating popular advice as a starting point rather than a conclusion​ and about ​context being the key to understanding any fitness advice​. They just read a little differently when I occasionally don’t take my own advice.)

The useful takeaways

Besides taking what you read or hear with a grain of salt, the thing worth remembering from the research is this: restrict the amount of activity that someone is accustomed to doing, and their mood measurably degrades inside a week—but also returns when the activity does.

That’s an argument about your own baseline, not a universal number. Which also means the comparison to the American average doesn’t hold up. What hurt the experimental group in this study was a drop of roughly 2,800 steps from their own habitual level, not necessarily their starting point. In contrast, someone who has walked 4,774 steps a day for years hasn’t dropped anything—and this study can’t say a word about how they feel because it didn’t evaluate anyone like them.

Putting it into practice

To be fair, none of this says that walking or doing other low-level activity doesn’t help. (More on that in a week or two.) It actually says the opposite—that reduced activity at times such as when you’re traveling or slammed at work costs you a surprising amount in mood^†. Which is a much better reason to protect your daily walk than an arbitrary number you’re afraid of falling under.

Start by finding your own floor. Wear whatever tracker you already own for a week and look at the average. That’s your number, and it’s allowed to be 4,000 or 12,000. The point isn’t hitting anything specific—it’s that you can’t notice a drop from a number you never measured.

And if your number comes in lower than you’d like and you want to up your game, I’ve personally used 5,650 steps as my daily target since before I wrote that 2023 tip—and I still recommend it. It is more movement than most people get, and it’s small enough to be reachable even on a bad day. Which, for a variety of reasons both mental and physical, is most of what makes a target useful in the first place.