Recently, I’ve been compulsively returning to the little red heart on my phone’s home screen. It’s not the gateway to some intriguing new dating app or an embarrassingly addictive mobile game – the truth is far more boring. The object of my obsession is Apple’s health tracker, which stores up stats on how many steps I’ve taken each day, week and month.
On a typical weekday, I’m aiming to reach 10,000, the number that’s been drilled into our brains as the optimum. Last Saturday, during a particularly active hen do, I managed to hit the 26,000 mark; the day kicked off with a three-hour hike, a particularly obvious tell for the fact that my friends and I are now in our thirties.
Did I bang on about this jaw-dropping achievement to everyone I encountered afterwards? Of course I did. That’s because, over the past few years, the step count has become a bit of a health humblebrag, a low-key way to notify others that yes, you are in fact a well-rounded, well-exercised human being with a highly calibrated work-life balance. And, in tandem, walking has undergone a stealthy rebrand.
Once the most unassuming form of working out, it’s now acquired a certain gloss. “Health, and the pursuit of wellness more generally, are hyper-aspirational in today’s world,” says Gabriela Serpa Royo, cultural strategist at Canvas8, a consumer insights agency. “There’s something about the luxury of walking, too. If you’re someone who walks then you’re someone who takes the time to take care of yourself.”
Social media is littered with screenshots from fitness trackers, which proudly proclaim the user’s daily number of steps (and somehow feels a little bit more understated than the outright brag of showing off running stats). Over on TikTok, you’ll find more than 183,000 posts tagged with #hotgirlwalk (more on that later). The 12-3-30 walking workout, which involves setting the treadmill’s incline to 12 then striding at 3mph for 30 minutes, is a viral sensation. And wellness podcasters extol the virtues of their daily walks as if they’re imparting a particularly life-changing secret. Essentially, “walking’s had a glow-up from something we all just did to something that now feels almost chic,” says Chloe Markham, a wellbeing coach and yoga teacher.
The fitness benefits are manifold. “A brisk walk is one of the easiest and most effective cardiovascular workouts,” says Dr Mohamed Najjar from Jorja Healthcare Group. It causes “an increase in blood flow, and an added level of pressure as the blood travels through the arteries”, which “keeps the cardiovascular system healthy and strong”. Walking can also contribute to improved cholesterol levels, a decrease in inflammation and a reduction in stress hormones such as cortisol, he adds. Studies have found that walking outside can be particularly beneficial for mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, too.
Most of this has been common knowledge for ages, and yet walking always seemed to be seen as slightly “less than” in the fitness world. So why this recent shift in attitudes? “I think fitness can often follow trend cycles in the same way as fashion or style, and different types of exercise come in and out of favour,” says psychotherapist Eloise Skinner, who is also a qualified fitness instructor and personal trainer.
The 2010s saw a real vogue for high-intensity exercise. Bougie spin class franchises migrated across the Atlantic from California and New York to London and beyond; their aesthetics were akin to a full-on nightclub, with the pounding music, flashing lights and astronomical price tags to match. People became evangelical about the cult of CrossFit. Alongside this, HIIT (high-intensity interval training) and Tabata, which involved very short, on-off bursts of vigorous exercise, were touted as the next big thing in health, a way of blasting through your workouts in a matter of minutes.
If you’re someone who walks then you’re someone who takes the time to take care of yourself
But during the pandemic, when gyms had to close their doors and group exercise was off the agenda, “walking became not just a way to move” but a means “to escape, decompress and cope with it all”, Markham says. And, just as lockdown prompted many to slow down and reassess their work-life balance, some found that adopting lower-impact exercise felt “more sustainable and more in tune with our bodies”, she adds. Now, Markham “works with lots of high-achieving women, and many of them are realising they don’t need to thrash themselves in a spin class to be well. They want movement that supports their nervous system, not sends it into overdrive. And low-impact options like walking, yoga and pilates are doing just that”.
At the same time, wellness culture has become inescapable online. Social media users flaunt intricate, aestheticised daily routines comprising exercise, skincare and other acts of “self-care”, with TikTok’s “hot girl walk” trend seamlessly slotting into all this. It originated during the pandemic, when creator Mia Lind told her followers to walk around 6km every day, while listening to “something inspirational”. And for the true “hot girl” experience, she explained, they needed to ponder “what you’re grateful for, what your goals are, and how hot you are” while strolling. Conveniently, as a fully optimised girlboss, these are the only things I’m ever thinking about at any one time.
Anything that gets people moving is probably a good thing, although I’ve always been slightly suspicious of anything marketed with a “hot girl” tag: not simply on the basis that it’s vaguely cringe-inducing to say out loud if you’re over the age of 25, but because it seems to be tied into a particular “look”. It’s got tangled up with wearing expensive matching activewear sets in tasteful pastel hues, while toting a £6 matcha iced latte; basically, it feels like just another example of how self-care practices can easily become marketed and commodified.
We can also thank the rise and rise of fitness trackers for aiding and abetting our step count fixation. A 2025 survey from Statista showed that 39 per cent of British women and 34 per cent of British men own and use a wearable device, while research from YouGov found that 48 per cent of respondents tracked their exercise using a device or app. These sleek little wristbands (that have a habit of passively aggressively informing you when it’s 8pm and you’re yet to hit your fitness goals) have “gamified” step counting, “making something simple feel satisfyingly measurable,” Markham says.
Many of them let you nose at how much your friends have been moving around, too, for added smug factor. And even the high-end fitness tracker brand Whoop, worn by sporting royalty such as LeBron James and Rory McIlroy (as well as actual royalty, such as Prince William), recently changed their party line on step count. They’d previously refused to track it on the grounds that other metrics (such as heart rate) were better indicators of health. Last autumn, though, they announced an about-turn, citing new research linking higher daily step count to a reduced risk of heart disease, obesity and depression – as well as a huge demand from customers (some of whom, according to Whoop CEO Will Ahmed, would wear another tracker purely to keep tabs on their steps).
So when it comes to our step count, what is the magic number? Ten thousand often gets cited as the holy grail for walkers, and has always been the amount I’ve aimed towards each day, but this is simply the result of a very successful marketing campaign. Back in 1964, in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics, a Japanese company launched a rudimentary pedometer called the Manpo-kei, which translated as the “10,000 steps meter”. It’s thought that the brand chose 10,000 because the Japanese character for that number looks a bit like a person walking (plus, it’s a simple number that’s easy to remember).
Step counts can be motivating for some folks, but focusing only on the number can pull us out of the joy of the walk itself
The idea stuck, and 10,000 has been touted as optimal amountaround the world ever since. But it turns out that we don’t necessarily need to be quite so strict. “Most medical advice, including the NHS website, suggests that the focus should be on overall moderate intensity activity rather than a prescribed number of steps per day,” says Skinner; the NHS guidelines, she adds, suggest 150 minutes of this each week.
Recent studies have found that briskly walking 8,000 steps can still be enough to bring a whole host of health benefits, such as reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. And in 2023, analysis of more than 226,000 people around the world showed that 4,000 steps was sufficient to start cutting the risk of premature death, with every extra 1,000 steps beyond that reducing this risk by 15 per cent. It seems, then, that we can definitely stop berating ourselves if we’re not hitting five figures every single day.
In fact, becoming too fixated on the number on a screen might be counterproductive. “Step counts can be motivating for some folks, but focusing only on the number can pull us out of the joy of the walk itself,” Markham says. “It becomes another to-do, another performance metric. And ironically, that can activate stress, the exact thing walking is meant to reduce. Movement should feel good, but if we’re walking just to hit 10,000 steps, we might miss the pleasure and presence it can offer.”
The key, she says, is to keep “checking in” with yourself, and “trusting that sometimes a slower walk, or no walk, is just as valuable as hitting the data goal”. And with that in mind, when I embark on my next weekend walk, I won’t be monitoring my app. Can’t promise I won’t sneak a look at everyone else’s stats, though.
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