Pedometers - Walking for Health and counting your steps
Why use Pedometers?
By Leaf McGowan
Pedometers are great devices to help keep you on track to a path to a healthy body, fitness, and a good heart. These pager-sized devices that you wear on your belt will record the number of steps you walk based on your body’s movement. From the high-tech digital models that record the number of calories burnt, to the simple step counter. It’s recommended for a healthy body, to maintain 10,000 steps a day.
Granted, I only hit 10,000-20,000/day by walking around Vienna, Austria and certain parts of Germany. I have yet to hit 10,000 steps a day here in rainy Seattle, even with a night of dancing (though dancing knocks my numbers up).
These devices are a great addition to vacations to see just how fit you’re staying while on vacation.
Recommended steps:
- long term health and reduced chronic disease risk: 10,000 steps a day
- successful, sustained weight loss: 12,000 - 15,000 steps a day
- aerobic fitness: Make 3,000 or more of your daily steps fast
How many steps is how many miles? You’ll have to calibrate your personal pedometer by walking a distance that you’ve measured and see what your pedometer says. Everyone has different paces, bodies, postures, length of stride, walking speed, etc. always varies so a given number cannot say for everyone. A mile is generally 5,280 feet. You can divide that by your steps in a mile and find the distance between each of your steps to figure out your stride.
So the real question is … how many steps do you do each day?
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