Dancing for your steps (and other ways to make up steps at the end of the day)

I’m on the sailboat visiting Renald this week and that means one of two things on any given day. Possibility 1: I’m out and about on land, covering lots of ground and hitting my step challenge target (if you’re wondering why I’ve got a target for daily steps, here’s the story of how FOMO got me to commit to another 100-day step challenge). Possibility 2: I’m boat bound (which is not always a bad thing in a general sense) and it’s tough even to get 5000 steps because everything I need is fewer than 20 steps away).

Sometimes there’s a mix of these two, where we go to shore but we park really close to where we plan to go. In any case, the upshot is this: it’s easy to get to the end of the day and fall short of my 13500 target (which I made a conscious choice to keep at this relatively low daily goal precisely because of the amount of time I spend on the boat each summer).

There are lots of ways to make up steps as the day comes to a close when you’re at home. You can go for a walk or a run later at night, for starters. I know quite a few people who do that. At the condo, I can even zip down to the treadmill if I like.

But my favourite way these days is to dance for those steps. It’s fun, easy to do anywhere (the other night I danced around my hotel room in Syracuse where I overnighted on my drive to Newport), and amazingly efficient at clocking up steps with the Pulse counter that I use (I’m not sure whether other gadgets count dancing).

Last night after Renald and I got back from the Jaws Summer Party (a live band followed by a screening of the original Jaws — so much fun), I was short a couple of thousand steps. “Let’s dance!” I said. And so for the next half an hour or so we took turns picking songs from Spotify and had a dance on board. It was a fun way to close out the night, dance with my partner who I don’t get to see all that often, and hit my step target.

At home I rarely have this issue. I’ve got my routines down and they include more than enough walking to surpass my daily goal, usually way before the end of the day. No last minute scrambles (or dances or walks around the block) needed.

As I said in response to Sam’s post yesterday about “Completism,” I lean in the “completist” direction. If I have a goal or target, I like to hit it. Like if we’re going running and we set out to do 10K, and we somehow get back to our starting point and we’re 0.3K short or something, I’ll drag you around the block. If my daily step target is 13500, I am not satisfied to go to bed with 13247.  So I like having ways of making up for missed steps before bedtime and dancing is a fabulous way.

How do you (or do you?) make up for shortfalls in your daily target at the end of the day?