Counting Steps

I’ve recently purchased a small pedometer to keep track of my steps in an effort to improve my health, since I mostly sit all day at work, and the health problems associated with sitting a lot are well-documented.  The first step (ha ha, get it…STEP….) for me is to figure out how well I’m doing.

My pedometer.  If only that was my daily total!

There are some fancy pedometers that keep track of all sorts of things and sync your fitness data to a website or smartphone with fancy charts and graphs, but they’re rather expensive. Mine is a basic 3-axis model that tracks the previous 7  days.  Every Sunday I update a spreadsheet so I can see my progress.  My goal is to get the dashed line closer to 10000, which is the recommended number of steps per day.  Some observations: I walk a lot more during the week than I do on weekends, probably because I try to walk around the block for 15 minutes every day after lunch during the week.  The drastic swings from one day to the next might be the pedometer picking up my leg jiggling during the day, since I think I normally walk about the same amount from day to day. I’ll have to investigate this further.