I swapped 10,000 steps a day for 30 minutes of ‘Japanese Walking’

The fitness industry is known for constantly pursuing the “next big thing” and pushing fad diets — but one form of exercise builds on a proven formula. Japanese walking, or high-intensity interval walking, originated from a 2007 Japanese study by Professor Hiroshi Nose and Shizue Masuki at Shinshu University. It studied health improvements in middle-aged and older adults. While its method became popular on social media, its scientific roots go back almost 20 years.

The idea of interval training as a way to improve fitness is not a new concept and goes back even further than the study. Boxers and other fighters have used this regime for decades in a bid to increase several athletic metrics. These include developing power, endurance, and the ability to recover between high-intensity bursts of activity. It has also been a method of training that has been utilised by militaries around the world who rely on it to improve running, cardio fitness, and operational fitness. In the traditional practice of interval training, participants will normally sprint to a point, then slow jog or walk to recover before repeating the process.

The Japanese are well known for their fitness methods and it is a tradition in their society for factories to conduct group exercise routines with workers called “Radio Taiso,” which encourages a community within the workplace.

The idea of walking 10,000 steps a day was also developed by the Japanese. According to the BBC, it is a concept that originated from a 1960s marketing campaign for a pedometer called the “Manpo-kei”. The number is rather arbitrary and was chosen to be a catchy, memorable goal to encourage people to be more active in the lead-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. While the marketing strategy was successful, there was initially no scientific basis for the 10,000-step figure.

The early pedometer was based on the work of Dr Yoshiro Hatano, a young academic at Kyushu University of Health and Welfare. The doctor was worried that the Japanese were busy importing a slothful American lifestyle, and wanted to help his countrymen get more active.

Dr Hatano believed that if he could persuade his fellow Japanese to increase their daily steps from 4,000 to around 10,000, then they would burn off approximately 500 extra calories a day and remain in good shape. But, office workers and those who work from home struggle to hit 10,000 steps a day, which takes about one to two hours of walking for most people. And now Japanese walking is being billed as an alternative, which saves time for those who do not possess a lot of it but want to improve upon a sedentary lifestyle.

The fitness trend is now going viral on social media platforms such as TikTok. As per the LA Times, the latest buzz started with a video from Australian content creator and fitness coach Eugene Teo. The footage surpassed 10 million views on TikTok and 17 million views on YouTube.

“Coach Eugene”, as he is known to his over 426,000 TikTok followers and 1.22 million YouTube followers, has rebranded the science-backed routine into an accessible, algorithm-friendly idea called “Japanese walking.”

In his video, Teo explains the method behind Japanese walking. He said a person walks fast for three minutes, then slows down for three before repeating the cycle five times.

During a recent interview with The Times, Teo said: “People don’t like fitness jargon. They don’t like scientific terms. And if I want to impact millions globally, I like to make fitness advice and scientific jargon a lot more accessible.

“It’s that cardio work that a lot of people are missing. A lot of people have this all-or-nothing approach where they think, ‘Oh, I can’t hit 10,000 steps. I’ve failed.’ It’s about just changing the stigma people have and that all-or-nothing mentality of what fitness should be about.”

The fitness instructor emphasises effort over perfection and encourages people to walk fast enough to get out of breath, but not so fast that they can’t finish the three-minute interval.

However, not everyone is convinced of this latest viral fitness trend. As per the LA Times, some in the scientific community are questioning the legitimacy of the results of Japanese walking.

Dr Helga Van Herle, a cardiologist with Keck Medicine of USC, noted flaws in the original study’s design — namely, that only the high-intensity walking group was monitored with accelerometers, not the moderate intensity group, a bias that could have skewed results.

She said in the email: “This creates a major bias in the monitoring and compliance and could potentially skew the results in favor of the high-intensity training group.”

The doctor pointed to a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne effect, where people alter their behavior because they know they’re being watched, which could have had a significant impact on the study’s results. And while most health care professionals agree that almost any movement is good for people, some of them are questioning the validity of the latest online fitness craze.