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According to Ross McConnell, North-East Project Officer for the , and himself a whelchair user, the answer is probably 10,000 pushes. He offers the following explanation.

"As a basketball player, I've used the rules of the able-bodied game and the wheelchair game to try and give an answer. In the running game, a 'travelling' violation occurs when a player takes three steps without bouncing the ball. In the wheelchair game, that rule is replaced by the 'three pushes' rule, more commonly known as 'two pushes and a bounce'. A push is considered to be one whole wheel rotation, so a simple answer would be 10,000 paces equals 10,000 whole wheel rotations.

"I realise this is open to criticism, as it all depends on whether you're measuring distance or effort. The basketball answer works well for distance, but it falls down when you consider the effort used to push. Wheelchair users can go down a slope and 'free-wheel', or even just give a bigger push on the flat and cover more distance. One push does not necessarily equal one wheel rotation.

"Like all quandaries, I suppose everyone has different answers that all have their faults and merits. That's my attempt at answering it, but I'm interested in the ideas that other people have come up with."

As Ross says, there are different answers to the question. One way is to look at effort rather than distance, i.e. to look at 10,000 paces as a way of reaching the recommended level of daily physical activity (30 minutes of moderate intensity activity each day). 10,000 steps is just an example or an extrapolation of this. Walking for 30 minutes, most people will cover approximately 1.5 - 2 miles, depending on their walking speed. The recommendation for wheelchair users would also be to carry out 30 minutes of moderate intensity activity, and therefore the extrapolation would be whatever distance / number of wheel revolutions the average individual accumulates in this time.

That's actually not the only quandary that disabled people have with the 10,000 paces question. Blind or partially sighted people will want to find a talking pedometer. These actually aren't that difficult to locate. Putting the words 'talking' and 'pedometer' into the search engine Google found around 28,500 references. They are also advertised in the national press.