Posts Tagged ‘extra step’
Wear a pedometer on the front of your waist, in line with one knee. Not in the middle under your belly button, and not off to side where cowboys have their holsters. Have it on the front of your body, but just off to one side; which side is up to you. This way makes it function when you’re walking of running at home on your horizon treadmill.
Make sure the pedometer is held straight up and down and is flat against your body – it shouldn’t be twisted to the left or right, nor should it be leaning forward or back. This can be a problem for folks who are high waisted or wear their pants pulled way up, or whose belly bulges enough to lean the pedometer forward. (A possible solution: If you’re more than 40 pounds overweight, you could use the New Lrfestyles NL Series or Omron HJ-112 pedometers, which will work even when tilted.)
Reset the pedometer to zero, and simply walk around a little bit while actually counting the steps taken by both feet. After you’ve counted 50 or more steps, check the pedometer and see if it agrees with your count. If you and the pedometer are within five steps, you’re in good shape. (It’s okay if its not exactly the same as your count. The pedometer may have registered an extra step when you closed it, or missed a tiny shuffle step that you counted.) However, if you find an error that’s greater than 10 percent, test it again. If the error is recurring, return the pedometer and get another.
Steps Matter
Even a modest number of steps spread over the day or week can make a difference. I recently tested one when doing our annual treadmill reviews and was very surprised to see how many steps I was taking each day. To illustrate this, imagine your weight has been stable, but because of a change in jobs you had to eliminate your 20-minute round-trip walk to the bus stop, five days a week. You’d lose about a half mile or 1,000 steps every morning and evening, Monday through Friday. Over a year, if you didn’t change anything else – didn’t change what you eat, didn’t increase or decrease your exercise level otherwise – you’d gain two to three pounds. A few pounds in one year; doesn’t sound like much, right? But do that for 10 to 15 years in a row, and you’re 30 pounds overweight – enough for a person of average height to be considered medically obese.
What’s more, Americans typically gain about two pounds each year of adulthood – a rate that clearly can be explained by a very small but consistent decrease in daily steps over time.
The point is that you need to be aware of these seemingly benign shifts in activity – they do add up, and they do affect your waistline. And not just your waistline – people who are insufficiently active are at an elevated risk for a disturbingly long list of afflictions from diabetes and cardiovascular disease to osteoporosis, clinical depression, and a growing list of cancers. Amazingly enough, losing steps every day could lead to losing several years of life span.
That’s the bad news. The good news is simple: A pedometer can help you monitor even small changes in activity level, can alert you when you need to accommodate for them, and can be a wonderfully effective motivational tool. But first you have to measure your current baseline of activity.