🎯 Today’s Mission:

To successfully complete today’s mission:

✅ Find some way to track your steps (smartphone, fitness tracker, pedometer, treadmill, distance walked, or time spent walking).

✅ Choose a step goal to push for today that takes you above how many steps you normally walk.

✅ [OPTIONAL] Share with us, in the Sleekgeek Movement Challenge Support Group, a photo of you walking around and getting your steps in.

✅ Complete the form at the bottom of the page when done.

💡 More Info:

Moving more throughout the day is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to improve your wellbeing.

According to Mark Sisson, author of the Primal Blueprint, some of the reasons you should be walking more include:

It helps reduce body fat.

It improves glycemic control (better blood glucose control and more stable insulin levels).

It improves triglyceride levels and lowers blood pressure.

It’s good for your brain, (cognition, memory, academic performance, creativity, and logic tests).

It reduces stress and boosts immune function.

It prevents falls in the elderly.

It gives you a chance to think and can be a form of meditation.

It keeps your buttocks engaged with the world, because excessive sitting causes glute inactivation and atrophy which brings about back pain, instability, and reduces strength.

It’s well tolerated by people with arthritis and many other health conditions who might not otherwise be able to exercise. Remember a little bit of something is still better than nothing.

So how about we bump walking more a little higher up our priority list?

🏃‍♀️ How Much Should You Walk?

Walking is just one of the many ways that you can improve your level of physical activity, so it will depend a lot on how active you are in other ways throughout the day.

However, we know research for public health have established that:

Those who take 5,000 steps a day or less are considered sedentary and at a higher risk for obesity, disease, and early death.

Those who take 10,000 steps a day or more are considered active and typically have less body fat and better overall health.

For some people, 10,000 steps might seem ridiculously easy (especially if you have an active job) but for most people, it’s rather high at the beginning (and for some, it’s just about impossible).

Even us at Sleekgeek spend most of our time working from home behind our computers or on our phones… If we didn’t push ourselves to deliberately get out and walk more, we would likely only get 2,000 – 3,000 steps a day on average.

So we understand, it’s challenging! (But do-able with some effort.)

We recommend using this as a guide to aim for:

4,000 steps a day (beginner – someone who lives a VERY sedentary lifestyle).

6,000 steps a day (intermediate – someone who lives a moderately sedentary lifestyle).

8,000 steps a day (advanced – someone who lives a moderately active lifestyle).

10,000+ steps a day (elite – someone who lives a very active lifestyle).

Whichever category you choose, it should be a challenge. It should push you out of your comfort zone so that you get better.

Getting your steps in shouldn’t be a “happy accident”. You should be consciously and actively looking for ways to add in more movement and walking throughout your day such as going for walks at lunch, taking the stairs, parking in the back of the parking lot, walking the dog instead of watching TV, and so on.

If you normally walk with a watch or phone that tracks your steps, you can go look at that data to see what your daily average usually is and then aim for something that’s 2,000 – 3,000 steps higher.

📏 How to Measure Your Steps:

Option 1: Pedometer or Fitness Tracking Device:

If you have some kind of pedometer or fitness tracker that tracks your steps, then you are in luck.

Option 2: Smartphone:

Most newer smartphones have their own built-in pedometers. If you aren’t sure, just search on Google for your phone make/model + the words “built-in pedometer”.

You should find some websites showing you how to use it if your phone does indeed have a built-in pedometer. If you’re still unsure, ask in the Sleekgeek Health Revolution Support Group on Facebook.

Option 3: Treadmill:

If you are a regular gym-goer and plan to get most of your steps in on the treadmill, then most treadmills will track your steps. This is not ideal because we would obviously like you to be out and about, getting in more movement throughout the day – but it’s better than nothing!

Option 4: Estimate:

The average person walking at a brisk and determined pace can expect to walk these number of steps based on distance and time walked:

Steps	Distance Walked	Time Spent Walking
1,000	0.8km	10 minutes
2,000	1.6km	20 minutes
3,000	2.4km	30 minutes
4,000	3.2km	40 minutes
5,000	4km	50 minutes
6,000	4.8km	1 hour
7,000	5.6km	1 hour 10 minutes
8,000	6.4km	1 hour 20 minutes
9,000	7.2km	1 hour 30 minutes
10,000	8km	1 hour 40 minutes

If you want to save/print a copy of this table for quick reference, you can download this image here.

🤔 How To Do It?

Walking 6,000 steps, for example, is roughly an hour of walking per day.

When we first learned this ourselves, our first thought was “Where the heck do we find another hour in our day to walk?!”

Then we took off our “excuses hat” and put on our “solutions hat”… and got moving!

We realised that 1 hour of walking could be:

2 x 30-minute walks

3 x 20-minute walks

4 x 15-minute walks

Or even 6 x 10-minute walks

When we broke it down like that, it became much more do-able.

We could easily afford to take 4 x 15-minute walks during the day instead of sitting around during my breaks and scrolling social media or talking to people.

Surely you can too?

PLUS, this is on top of all the other steps you would normally get in throughout the day walking from your bed to your bathroom, from your bathroom to your kitchen, from your kitchen to your car, from your car to your office, from your desk to the bathroom, and so on.