Back in confinement, my former roommate Megan used to drag me outside to walk around our little garden. The reason why? She hadn’t reached her 10,000 step goal and wanted to close the rings on her fitness tracker.
Fast forward two years, and many of us are still chasing that goal. The mental and physical health benefits of walking are very real, so it’s no wonder many of us still walk through parks on our lunch breaks or up and down stairs before bed. just to feel the satisfying vibe of our trackers celebrating this 10,000th milestone.
And that’s a great thing; more people than ever are working in a hybrid way, which still means that on days at home we run the risk of missing “incidental steps,” says walking expert Marie Murphy. She heads the scientific body responsible for reviewing UK guidelines on physical activity for adults. “Even if you’re not an active commuter, you still walk normally to your car, to the station, to your office building,” she says. Stylist.
“The difference between working from home and working in a normal office environment is big; you used to get up to talk to people and even the toilets are further away than they are in your house. These “accessory” steps help break sedentary lifestyles. »
Although I’m not married to a tracker like my former roommate, I use an app to loosely check if I’ve moved enough throughout the day. When I work in the office, I exceed 10,000 steps with no problem. I get out of bed and head straight to the gym, where I finish a strength workout before heading to work. I spend my days walking up and down the stairs to the office and going out for lunch, before trudging home 20 minutes from the subway station at night.
When working from home, however, I’m less active – and that fact has made me more aware of my movement than ever. But is the need to time a minimum number of steps per day wrong? Research from the University of Massachusetts suggests that might be the case. A scientist found that walking at least 7,000 steps a day reduced middle-aged people’s risk of premature death by 50-70%, but walking more than 10,000 steps a day had no added benefit.
This isn’t the first article to find that 10,000 isn’t necessarily the best number. Studies from Harvard Medical School found that women who averaged around 4,400 steps per day had a significantly lower death rate than those who averaged around 2,700 steps per day. The more steps women took, the lower the death rate – but only until they reached 7,500 steps. At this point, the health benefits have stabilized. So if the extra two or three thousand steps don’t help, why are we so obsessed with them?
Well, the 10,000 steps per day recommendation is actually a marketing ploy that dates back to a Japanese brand of pedometers in the 1960s. The device, called a manpo-kei which translates to 10,000 meters of steps, popularized the pretty round number as a slogan. 50 years later, we are all still attached to it.
However, what gets lost in the glorification of step counts is that the UK has no guidelines on how many steps we should take per day. Rather, the advice is that we get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity during the week.
Of course, momentum and step count are correlated: “Evidence shows that people who take 10,000 steps generally tend to meet the 150-minute exercise guidelines,” Murphy says. “But that’s because to take that many steps, people will have had to add a brisk walk or a run, or some kind of formal activity into their day.”
It’s getting your heart rate up, rather than walking, that really matters. In 2018, Public Health England advised people to “focus on brisk walking, not just 10,000 steps, to improve their health”, advising people to start with 10 minutes of targeted activity a day.
So, no, it’s not the end of the world if the only steps you lose are the ones you take from your front door to your car – as long as you go up in heart rate increasing steps and then do some exercise at home.
“The obsession with taking 10,000 steps is a mistake, especially in today’s environment,” adds Murphy. “It’s best to focus on replacing the current step deficit with something structured, like cardio training, gardening, playing soccer with your kids, or anything that will get you to the intensity goal. moderate.”
So that’s what I did. Rather than forcing myself to do my steps, I added an extra cardio session at the end of my workouts after my upper body circuits or lower body supersets. It means my heart beats faster to compensate for the lack of other movement, and it’s better than taking a stressful walk around the block after a long day at work. But one thing I definitely don’t do anymore? Survey my garden.
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