As a nation, life is becoming more sedentary especially when many jobs involves sitting in front of a computer for hours (including mine!). But one way to help track your activity levels and get more active without the pressure of scheduled exercise only, is to wear a pedometer and increase your daily steps.
A pedometer is a little devise that you clip to your hip (or you can get an app that does it on your smartphone) that measures how many steps you do in a day. The idea is to wear the pedometer for a few days where you do your normal amount of steps/activity and then use this information to start increasing your steps to an eventual aim of 10000 (or nearby) per day.
How to go about it?
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For 2-3 days, wear your pedometer all day and measure your steps. Then work out the average. (ensure you do not do extra steps to what you would normally do – we want your honest normal daily steps!)
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Then aim to increase your average daily steps by 1000-2000 steps. Do this for a week or 2 or 3 until you are able to maintain it.
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Once you have a new maintainable amount of steps, increase your steps again.
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Keep working on this until you reach 10000 a day (or nearby). Feel free to do more if keen!
Note: If you are not able to do 10000, don’t worry, any improvement is a good start, just keep working on it and try and add in scheduled exercise.