You Don’t Need to Walk 10,000 Steps a Day

How many of us have said, “I’m trying to get my 10,000 steps in every day”?
But I don’t believe in walking simply to reach a number.
When you engage the right muscles, even a smaller number of steps can make a dramatic difference to your body.

Unfortunately, when I look around, I see very few people who walk with good form.
We have 600 muscles in our bodies. It seems such a waste to carry them around as “dead weight” instead of putting them to work.

The muscles along the back of the body are especially important.
Very few people fully engage the muscles at the back of the neck, around the shoulder blades, down the back, and through the buttocks, hamstrings, and calves. When those muscles are slack, gravity pulls the body forward, leading to a hunched posture and bowed legs. People sometimes notice their stomach sticking out and decide to work on their abs. But first, they need to wake up the muscles at the back of the body and bring themselves upright.

As your posture changes, your internal organs are lifted. Not only do those issues improve, but better skeletal alignment also gives your face a slimmer, more defined appearance. Even your expression changes. I watch people become more confident, vibrant, and youthful.

My first insight into this connection between posture and the muscles at the back of the body came from an unwelcome change in my own figure.

From the Perfect Homemaker to a Serial Dieter
“Dieting Was My Hobby. Gaining It Back Was My Specialty.”

At 20, I moved to Fukuoka when my father was transferred there for work. After graduating from junior college, I joined a local bank.
At the time, sexual harassment and workplace bullying were commonplace, and the sales targets were demanding. To be honest, I wanted to leave after my first year.
Yet just as I was about to raise it with my parents, my father was suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer during a health check. Only a short time earlier, he had been delighted that his diet seemed to be working. He was 53. Less than a year later, he was gone. My brother and I were devastated, but my mother took it hardest. I simply couldn’t tell her I wanted to quit the bank. I was afraid it would be more than she could bear, so I put the idea aside.
Over time, staff transfers brought new people, circumstances changed, and I began to enjoy the work a little more. In the end, I stayed for nine and a half years, leaving when I married a colleague. Back then, women were expected to leave their jobs when they married, so I decided to become a full-time homemaker.
For the next 17 years, I was determined that my husband wouldn’t have to lift a finger at home. From cleaning and every other household chore to changing lightbulbs and taking out the trash, I handled it all.

I assumed I would carry on being a homemaker indefinitely. Then I ran into a problem. Between almost daily lunches with friends and potluck gatherings, I entered what you might call a “growth spurt”—only I was growing sideways.
Determined to lose the weight, I tried everything: the apple diet, the natto diet, the cabbage diet, Billy’s Boot Camp… Nothing worked. “Dieting was my hobby. Gaining it back was my specialty.” That summed me up perfectly.
Before long, I was sinking into an increasingly negative mindset: “I’m just a middle-aged woman anyway.”
Then I took up futsal, absolutely convinced that this time I would lose weight. But the gap between what I imagined and what my body could actually do was enormous. In my head, I was keeping up with the ball. In reality, I couldn’t catch it. I would step on it and go tumbling, and I kept suffering muscle strains and sprains. I began to think, “At this rate, I won’t lose weight—I’ll lose the ability to walk.”

A Healthier Way to Look Your Best: Walking for Better Posture and Gut Health

One day, a flyer for a fitness-instructor training school landed in my mailbox. Alongside exercise physiology and anatomy, the curriculum included walking. “If I go here, I can learn how to walk properly!” I thought. I promptly quit my part-time office job, took the entrance exam, and enrolled. I was 46.

I loved the walking classes from the moment they began. After graduating, I decided to work with the instructor who had taught me. But the focus was on the kind of runway walk you might see at Miss Universe. That wasn’t what I truly wanted to teach. I wanted a way of walking that brought body and mind into balance and allowed confidence to emerge from within. Once I recognized that we were heading in different directions, I decided to go out on my own.
Later, I met a physical therapist who specialized in pelvic alignment. Studying with this new teacher gave me a deeper understanding of how the body works.
“Why not combine these pelvic-alignment techniques with the walking I’ve been teaching?”
The idea suddenly came to me.
That was how, at 50, I developed my own walking method designed to improve posture and support gut health. In Japan, it is known as Kotsuban Chosei Walking.

Rather than simply saying, “Walk like this,” my approach is, “To walk like this, you need to use these muscles.” Our muscles all work together. By learning to engage different parts of the body—from the ankles to the buttocks—we build a body that functions as a team. To teach that, I divided the body into eight sections and designed my lessons around them.

From Packed Classes to Mounting Losses—and Debt

Going independent was one thing. Finding students was another. At first, I had no idea how to attract them. I rented a corner of a small café, with barely enough room to take a few steps, and started quietly with one or two students. Word of mouth gradually brought more people. Eventually, I began renting studio space in Fukuoka and training instructors, too.

At one point, someone I respected invited me to an expensive seminar outside my home prefecture. My child was still young, so I would need to arrange childcare, and having only recently been a full-time homemaker, I didn’t have money to spare. I nearly gave up on the idea. Then I thought, “If I keep using money and time as reasons not to do things, I’ll spend my whole life doing nothing.” I made up my mind and said, “I’m going!” The seminar organizer was moved by my passion for walking and introduced me to someone at a health magazine. I immediately pitched an idea. It was accepted, and suddenly my work was being featured across 12 full-color pages.
“It’s a miracle!” I thought. Riding that momentum, I rented studio space in Nishi-Shinjuku and brought my lessons to Tokyo.

At first, the magazine coverage filled the classes. But the effect was temporary. Attendance gradually fell, and I began losing substantial amounts of money on every lesson. Still, two or three students kept coming. I decided, “As long as they’re here, I’ll keep going.”
There were plenty of painful moments: running through snowy Nishi-Shinjuku in my short-sleeved teaching clothes to find a student who had lost their way, or sitting in an empty studio, waiting for people who never came.

Then came an unexpected turning point.
Through an introduction from a student, I was given a regular column on a women’s magazine website. Everything changed. Trial classes filled immediately, and the waiting list grew to 240.
With the business growing steadily in both Fukuoka and Tokyo, I thought, “This is it. Now we’re really getting started.” I opened my own studio in April 2020.
The timing could not have been worse: it coincided with the COVID-19 state of emergency. The studio closed immediately. We couldn’t bring students in. It was just us, working quietly behind closed doors in our masks. Meanwhile, money kept draining out of my account each month to cover the high rent and repayments for the renovation work. In the end, I took out pandemic-relief loans and found myself almost ¥30 million in debt.

There Was Only One Option: Find a Way

Sitting and waiting wasn’t going to repay those loans. “I have to find a way,” I told myself, and took the plunge into online lessons. Until then, I had been convinced it was impossible to teach walking online. Absolutely impossible. But now I committed myself to making it work.
If I was going to do it, I wanted results even better than those from in-person lessons. I spent a year rebuilding the program and putting the online system in place.

At first, nothing worked. Again and again, people told me, “I just can’t see myself doing this online.” But I refused to give up. I kept pitching the lessons from morning to night, until my voice gave out, and reached out to former students, too.
I built in extensive support: three months of unlimited lessons, written materials, and video recordings to review students’ form.
Today, we have students not only across Japan but overseas as well, and our network has grown to more than 260 instructors.
Without the pandemic, I think I would simply have worn myself out traveling back and forth between Fukuoka and Tokyo. I doubt this work would ever have reached so far.

To Walk Is to Live

Even with the debt and all the hardships that followed, I was able to keep going because, to me, walking is living.
When I had neither money nor time, when the business kept losing money, and when the pandemic left me deeper in debt, one conviction never wavered: “I will spend the rest of my life teaching this way of walking.”

What I teach isn’t simply a walking technique. It’s confidence in yourself. When you keep working with your body rather than giving up on it, it responds. In many ways, I feel that describes my own life, too.
At school, we’re taught how to hold chopsticks, but no one teaches us how to walk.
The way the body works is directly connected to the way the mind works. Change how you walk, and your posture changes. Your body changes. Eventually, that changes your outlook and your confidence in life.
I don’t want people to walk with rounded shoulders and their eyes on the ground, as if to say, “Please don’t look at me.” I want them to bring their bodies into alignment, open their chests, and walk tall, facing forward with the confidence to say, “Look at me!”
There is no reason to give up because you think you’re too old or you’ve never been good at exercise. Wake up your muscles, and your body can change at any age. You can stay youthful.
As long as there are people walking on two feet, I will keep taking this message to the world. To stand firmly on your own feet and keep walking with vitality throughout your life—that is the confidence I want to pass on to as many people as I can.

August 2026
At Kotsuban Chosei Walking Co., Ltd.
Interview and editing: DK Sugiyama
Project manager: Chiho Ando
Written by Eri Shibata, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, My Philosophy
Photography: Misa Shigematsu
Production: My Philosophy^® Editorial Team