150 min by 52 weeks in a year is 130 hours a year.
130 hours a year from say age 30 to age 80 is 6500 hours walking.
And so that gains you 3 years, which is 26280 hours, or 17520 awake hours.
So you are gaining about 17520-6500=11020 hours of life to use for things other than walking which is more like just under 2 years in days counting only awake hours.
Now of course it's certainly possible to do things you enjoy while you walk or perhaps things you would have done otherwise while not walking.
For instance I suppose a treadmill desk and using it to walk when you would have just been sitting instead.
Do you mind sharing the treadmill that you are using? I know I can do a google search, but I read a lot of bad reviews on the cheap ones and that they smell like burnt plastic nearing 1hr continuous usage.
Look at it this way: if you don't walk at least 15,000 steps a week, you can expect your lifespan to shorten by 3 years on average. 15,000 steps is in the realm of bare minimums.
As someone who has been getting around 15,000 steps per week (according to my phone), this number seems to low. I sometimes pace around while on the phone for work (usually without my phone on me, so my true number is likely a little higher). Other than that, I walk very little. Based on my experience living this life, it’s not good. I have had a noticeable decrease is how steady I am on my feet, various pains from a lack of movement and activity, and it got to the point where I received a notification on my phone that I’m at high risk of falling sometime in the next year. That’s not a notification someone in their early 40s should get.
Maybe 15k steps is better than laying in a bed all day and never waking at all; I’ll buy that. However, it’s far from optimal and shouldn’t be anyone’s benchmark, assuming they have some base level of mobility to start with.
Only getting 15,000 steps per week requires an extremely sedentary lifestyle, one which can likely only be accomplished while working from home.
Indeed, the only day in the last 4 weeks I walked so little was a day I worked for home and didn't venture more than a block from my condo, resulting in a mere 2,107 steps (according to my Garmin watch). On an average workday (where I commute to work via train + walking), it's hard to get below 6k steps..add taking the daughter to the playground or going to the store and my average over the last 4 weeks is 10,021 steps a day without particularly seeking out extra steps...
Exactly. There are all these steps you don't even think about when you actually have to leave the house.
I have estimated that I have to go on about a 90-100 minute walk a day to get back to what I was moving in 2019. I was walking 60 minutes a day , 5 times a week for exercise then and going to the office.
No humans have ever moved as little as the modern remote worker is moving. There is going to be a massive price to pay for this over time.
It's small compared to the oft-repeated "10,000 steps per day" benchmark, but that originated as a marketing gimmick for pedometers with no scientific justification for the number. It's been a while since I've actually looked at studies, but I believe they mostly show diminishing returns that rapidly flatten at ~6,000-8,000 steps per day for most people. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if ~2,000 steps per day still has a significant benefit.
“Every step above 2,200 steps a day reduces risk of early death, study finds. Research suggests every extra step up to 10,000 reduces risk even if rest of the day is sedentary”
I bought a standing desk and a foldable walking pad. Over the course of a few weeks went from about 2000 steps a day to 12,000. Very happy with it and I feel much better.
15,000 steps a day would be at least 11km each day for me and around thrice the amount of steps an average American walks each day on average [1]. Calling that a "small number of steps" just isn't true.
If you live in a city and take mass transit, you probably do more than this without thinking about it. If you're in the burbs, I don't know if random bumming around your house, and crossing a parking lot, and going from your desk to conference rooms a few times a day, would add up to that.
Bit more context - the Vitality here is a rewards program started by medical insurer Discovery.
One of those go to gym twice a week get a discount on something type of reward schemes. Also big on apple watches/step counters. And because its a program attached to medical insurance they have that data on medical side too.
So there is a whiff of PR & self-promotion in this, but they do also legitimately have access to good data at scale so probably not wrong
How much sampling bias is there in this, though? The people that own devices that can count steps will tend to be those who are active enough to consider monitoring them something that might be worth doing.
And then there are people like my wife that typically get over 5,000 "steps" because she's always doing things with her hands. Her insurance was giving her $60/year for wearing my old FitBit (I had upgraded to the waterproof version.) Now it's down to $20/year and soon she's going to quit wearing it. What they will really be measuring is that $20/year is not going to prompt her to replace it when the battery finishes dying.
Is there a difference between steps accumulated walking miles nonstop versus steps accumulated doing chores in the house in between longer bouts of sitting?
Readit News
1000 steps takes about 10 minutes.
15K steps takes about 150 minutes.
150 min by 52 weeks in a year is 130 hours a year.
130 hours a year from say age 30 to age 80 is 6500 hours walking.
And so that gains you 3 years, which is 26280 hours, or 17520 awake hours.
So you are gaining about 17520-6500=11020 hours of life to use for things other than walking which is more like just under 2 years in days counting only awake hours.
Now of course it's certainly possible to do things you enjoy while you walk or perhaps things you would have done otherwise while not walking.
For instance I suppose a treadmill desk and using it to walk when you would have just been sitting instead.
Maybe 15k steps is better than laying in a bed all day and never waking at all; I’ll buy that. However, it’s far from optimal and shouldn’t be anyone’s benchmark, assuming they have some base level of mobility to start with.
Only getting 15,000 steps per week requires an extremely sedentary lifestyle, one which can likely only be accomplished while working from home.
I have estimated that I have to go on about a 90-100 minute walk a day to get back to what I was moving in 2019. I was walking 60 minutes a day , 5 times a week for exercise then and going to the office.
No humans have ever moved as little as the modern remote worker is moving. There is going to be a massive price to pay for this over time.
Dead Comment
“Every step above 2,200 steps a day reduces risk of early death, study finds. Research suggests every extra step up to 10,000 reduces risk even if rest of the day is sedentary”
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-dept...
(15,000 steps/week) * (3 feet/step) / (5280 feet/mile) / (7 days/week) = 1.2 miles/day. Or, one 0.6-mile-distant round-trip
If you live in a city and take mass transit, you probably do more than this without thinking about it. If you're in the burbs, I don't know if random bumming around your house, and crossing a parking lot, and going from your desk to conference rooms a few times a day, would add up to that.
One of those go to gym twice a week get a discount on something type of reward schemes. Also big on apple watches/step counters. And because its a program attached to medical insurance they have that data on medical side too.
So there is a whiff of PR & self-promotion in this, but they do also legitimately have access to good data at scale so probably not wrong
And then there are people like my wife that typically get over 5,000 "steps" because she's always doing things with her hands. Her insurance was giving her $60/year for wearing my old FitBit (I had upgraded to the waterproof version.) Now it's down to $20/year and soon she's going to quit wearing it. What they will really be measuring is that $20/year is not going to prompt her to replace it when the battery finishes dying.
My gut assumption would be - yes?