Getting On Your Feet
I hate to exercise. There. I said it. In my whole life, I’ve never kept up with any fitness regimen, no matter how gentle, more than a couple of months. It doesn’t help that every article you read makes you feel like a complete loser if you don’t exercise, or, if you do, if you don’t do enough. Whatever “enough” is.
Lately, I’d been seeing articles on walking 10,000 steps a day. Well, though I hate exercise, I like to walk. My husband and I enjoy hiking and would like to live near more trails. As it is, there are only a few trails near us, so that most hikes involve a 1 hour commute each way. Adding two hours of commute time on top of the hike time makes it difficult for us to find enough time to go on a regular basis. For that reason, we bought a treadmill back in 2001. Since then, it has sat around the basement, unused for the most part.
Well, I decided I’d try to get in the habit of walking on the treadmill . . . again. In the past 7 years, I’ve tried that many times before. What made this time different was that a) we moved the treadmill to the bedroom, and b) I have a pedometer.
My pedometer is an Omron HJ-720ITC, which comes with software for your computer. Once the software is installed, you plug the pedometer into the cable and download the data. You can track yourself for weeks, months, even years. The main downside is that the software only allows you one goal. Therefore, every time you change your goal, all your previous months of effort are suddenly assigned a sad face icon for falling short. One more depressing thing about exercise — getting assigned sad faces for days you really did meet your goal!
However, having a pedometer does make meeting a goal easier. I discovered I walked about 1000 steps in an average grocery store trip, so on shopping days, there’s less treadmill time. Cleaning house can often take 2000 steps. Otherwise, I discovered that I walked a mere 400-500 steps per day. Well, I sit to write, I sit to research, I sit to work on stained glass projects, I sit to read . . . most of my day is spent, yes, sitting. Jumping from 500 steps per day to 10,000 was clearly unreasonable.
Having a manageable goal (mine has been 6000 steps a day) means I meet it most of the time. The downside is that, even though I started at about 500 steps per day (except on cleaning or shopping days), and have thus increased my walking significantly, I am still only a “low-active” exerciser. “Low-active?” I’d like to find one of the fools who assigns an hour of walking per day to a “low-active” level of fitness. How in the world am I supposed to find the time to be even moderately active if an hour a day isn’t enough? It seems like you just can’t win.
Fortunately, even though many organizations recommend 10,000 steps per day, that number was apparently pulled out of the air by a Japanese pedometer manufacturer. No scientist discovered, after years of clinical trials, that 10,000 was a magical number of steps guaranteed to keep you healthier. In fact, any increase in one’s exercise level helps. For me, going from, on average, 500 steps a day to 6000 — and staying there without quitting — is going to have to be good enough.
Copyright . Published 1 April 2008 in The Zone.
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