Fit walking into your life!

Step Counters Motivate Walkers

How many steps do you take in a day? How many should you take? A Harvard Study (*see link below) showed that walking even 1 mile/day reduced death rates. Optimum benefit for maintaining health and reducing the risk of chronic disease required approximately 6,000 steps per day. For most people, that's the equivalent of walking for one hour, though these can be accumulated steps rather than one long walk.

10,000 Steps for Weight Management

The average daily step count for many people is a meagre 3 or 4,000 steps. At this rate many will gain unwanted weight, and become increasingly at risk of contracting a chronic disease. To burn off extra calories for weight loss, walk 10,000 steps per day most days of the week. If aerobic fitness is your goal, make 6,000 of those 10,000 steps a more determined pace. Your heart rate should be 60 - 70% of your maximum heart rate.  At this rate, you should be breathing noticeably, but able to carry on a conversation in full sentences. In order to get judge a 'more determined pace', imagine you are ten minutes late for an appointment! If you want to lose weight you have already gained, you will need to notch up between 12,000 – 15,000 steps a day, and make sure your calorific intake does not exceed your energy expenditure!

Stop thinking distance and start thinking steps.

Wearing a step counter all day, you can see how many steps you are really achieving, and aim towards your goal of 6,000 - 10,000 steps. This step counter has a default stride length and adjusts slightly if you are walking quickly when your stride length increases. But don’t worry about the distance – 10,000 steps is roughly 5 miles even if you are doing it all going up and down the stairs. Because of the wide variation of fitness levels and personal physiology of individuals, also don't treat the calorie estimates as being particularly accurate, but notice the difference from day to day and how you feel.