It wasn’t the first time that I was reading about how it is now said that ideally, one should walk 10,000 steps every day for cardiovascular health - more that that, actually, for weight loss. Of course, in my great wisdom, I chuckled a bit at all of this, thinking that evidently, I was walking more than 10,000 steps a day, and that probably most people were doing it as well. Right, genius. I was up for quite a surprise.
A few days ago, I had laid my hands on a cheap pedometer model at the local sports accessories store; I’ve never had any before that day, and it’s probably as good as a “starting” model can be, as it keeps trakc of what I consider the main two numbers: the amount of steps and of kilometers walked. My nifty little device has to be clipped at the waist, either on the pants’ waistband or on the belt, to be as close as possible to the center of the body; from what I could observe, it reacts to the moves occurring during the act of walking, which means that it will also register activity on, say, a stairmaster or an elliptical machine, but not on a bike. Again, right, if doing this type of exercise at the gym, I was even more certainly going above the 10,000 mark? Wrong.
I’ve tried it for three days so far, to satisfy my curiosity, for starters. The first day was a semi-busy one, involving housework, a long walk with the dog, a session at the gym, and walking often from one room to the other in order to install and configure a bank of computers for one of our customers. The rest was seated work at the comp, mostly. When I looked at my fancy little device, it had registered 7,000 steps. Wait, this was after I cheated a bit and walked on the spot where I was standing, before going to bed, in order to reach this “round” number. The day after was busier, as I had to go to town and walk a lot, but I still went to barely 7,500. The third day was a Sunday, and despite a good hour of hiking in the hills nearby with our dog, it still barely topped 9,000. Not so easy.
There’s one thing that saved me from really ridiculizing myself through low amount of walking: I’m an air-head. I don’t optimize my walks in the house. If I get upstairs to pick up a book and open a window, you can be sure I’ll do one of these tasks, forget the other, and then have to climb back up when I finally realize it. On days when I have to complete lots of housework, you can bet I spend my time running from one room to the other, trying to figure out where the heck I’ve left my sweeper or my pack of trashcan bags. Well, at least this flaw of mine has its use when it comes to moving.
Of course, 10,000 is what I consider a symbolic number more than anything else; even if reaching this goal in a day, it’s always better to walk them all at once, rather than walking a few here and there and wait until it all piles up. All these steps, it makes about 5 miles (8 kilometers for my metric mind). In our society where cars and other engine vehicles are the primary way of going to the places we want to go, I now doubt that most people do complete such daily travels, especially when I see my neighbors take their cars to perform as simple tasks as dropping their children at school or going buy their bread.
It also made me realize how much I should prefer walk to the car. Walk to the post-office to drop my letters, then come back to fetch my car and drive into town, rather than take the letters with me on my way to town, and stop briefly at the post-office for them. Sure thing, it takes more time. But if I can’t manage to keep my head on my shoulders and minimize my amount of steps when at home, surely I’m not the worse candidate for walking more outside?
There’s something really fascinating about these little numbers at my waist, something almost magical. In a way, they tell you whether you’ve been naughty or nice, whether you’ve already walked enough in half a day, or barely have scrapped a mere 200 steps while the morning was spent working on the computer. In a way, I can even feel somewhat excited at the idea of reaching the 10,000 steps, and this probably will make give some extra efforts at times, if only to see the numbers up some more toward the mile.
I should try to do more, yes. I’ll even enlist the help of my whiny yet so funny dog. After all, he loves walking, and I know he wouldn’t be against longer walks. Who knows, he may even become my better support in this!
- Kery
