Pokemon GO Egg Distances and an Honest Daily Step Goal

When I was coming back from knee surgery, my physio gave me a walking target and I ignored it within a week. Not out of laziness. The number she gave me, 10,000 steps a day, felt both arbitrary and impossible on a knee that ached after 3,000. I spent a month swinging between overdoing it on good days and doing nothing on bad ones, which is exactly the pattern that sets a recovery back.

What finally fixed it was not a better plan from a professional. It was a 5 kilometre egg in Pokémon GO, and the realisation that the game was giving me a more honest target than the one stuck on my fridge.

Where 10,000 steps came from

The 10,000 figure is not from a study. It traces back to a pedometer sold in Japan in the mid 1960s, around the Tokyo Olympics, under a name that roughly translates as "10,000 step meter". It was a good round number for marketing, and it stuck.

The research since then tells a more nuanced story. A 2019 study led by I-Min Lee, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, followed around 16,700 older women, average age 72. Women who walked about 4,400 steps a day had noticeably lower mortality than those at about 2,700, and the benefit kept improving up to roughly 7,500 steps before levelling off. A larger 2022 analysis in The Lancet Public Health, pooling 15 studies, found the benefit flattening at about 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day for people over 60, and at about 8,000 to 10,000 for younger adults.

So 10,000 is not wrong, exactly. It is just a high bar presented as the minimum, and for someone starting from a low base it can make the whole exercise feel like failure.

What the eggs taught me

Pokémon GO hatches eggs based on distance walked, and the eggs come in fixed sizes: 2, 5, 7, 10 and 12 kilometres. The game counts distance from your phone's GPS and, if you turn on Adventure Sync, from your phone's health data even when the app is closed. There is a catch that runners discover quickly. The game stops counting if you move faster than about 10.5 kilometres an hour, because it assumes you are in a car. A steady 5:30 per kilometre run, which is about 10.9 kilometres an hour, can leave an egg exactly where it was.

For walking, though, the distances turn out to line up with the research surprisingly well. An average walking stride is somewhere around 0.7 to 0.8 metres, so a kilometre is roughly 1,300 to 1,400 steps. That makes a 5 kilometre egg about 6,500 to 7,000 steps, right in the range where the research says most of the benefit sits. A 2 kilometre egg is about 2,700 steps, which is almost exactly the lowest group in the 2019 study.

Here is how my first eight weeks back looked, using eggs rather than a step target:

Weeks 1 and 2: one 2 kilometre egg a day, split into two walks. Knee mostly fine.
Weeks 3 and 4: one 2 kilometre egg plus half of a 5 kilometre egg, about 6 kilometres across two days for the bigger one.
Weeks 5 and 6: one 5 kilometre egg every other day, a 2 kilometre egg on the days between.
Weeks 7 and 8: one 5 kilometre egg most days, with one rest day a week where I hatched nothing.

None of that is a prescription. My physio approved the outline, and your knee or back or hip will have its own opinion. But the structure worked because each step up was small and clear, and because the game made the target concrete.

Why "just walk more" does not stick

The usual advice for anyone sedentary is simply to walk more, which nobody disagrees with and almost nobody follows. In my experience it fails for two reasons. There is no clear finish line, so a walk ends when you get bored rather than when you have done enough. And there is no feedback on progress, so the 4,000 steps you did this week feel the same as the 3,000 you did last week.

The egg fixes both, at least for me. It has an end. It shows a bar filling up. It rewards finishing rather than starting. That is not unique to Pokémon GO. Many step tracking apps can do the same, and a plain pedometer with a written log can too. What the game adds is a reason to check the bar.

A 5 kilometre egg is about 6,500 steps. That is closer to what the research supports than the number printed on most fitness trackers.

I will add one caution. Games like this are built to keep you playing, and a few weeks in I caught myself walking extra loops on a sore knee because a rare egg was nearly done. That is the same trap as chasing any streak. The piece on why rest days are not optional applies to walking targets as much as to the gym.

Setting your own honest number

If 10,000 has been sitting on your fridge making you feel guilty, try replacing it with something you can defend. For most adults, somewhere between 6,500 and 8,000 steps a day captures most of the health benefit the research has found. If you are starting well below that, aim to add around 1,000 steps a day to your current average every week or two, not to jump straight to the target.

Good shoes matter more than people expect once walking becomes daily, especially on pavements, and our guide to choosing running shoes covers the same things you want in a walking pair. For keeping it going past the first month, how to stay consistent with training has a few habits that helped me.

This week, look at your phone's health app and find your average daily steps for the past seven days. Divide by 1,350 to get your rough daily distance in kilometres. Then add roughly 1,000 steps, about three quarters of a kilometre: if you average 2 kilometres, aim for about 2.75. Hold that for two weeks before you move again, and only reach for the 5 kilometre egg once the smaller target feels ordinary.