As a person who does philosophy in her day job, I know that some questions are eternal– we keep asking them over and over, looking for better answers. Questions like these:
- What is the true nature of the good?
- What separates knowledge from true belief?
- Is there an independent reality, or do we construct it?
- Just how many steps a day do I really need in order to be healthy?
Yes, we are just not satisfied with the answers we get to the “how many steps a day?” question. Why? Because we get so many different answers: 10K, 5K, 4K, 2.2K among them.
Well, worry no more: the paper of record, the New York Times, has once again come to our rescue. Their answer to our question is this: it’s not how many steps you walk, but how you walk that matters. They break it down nicely for us into a list.
- Begin walking.
- Walk faster.
- Walk outdoors.
- Walk uphill.
- Carry weight (e.g. on your back in a backpack).
- Try jogging (which I first read as juggling, after which I was sort of relieved but also disappointed)
Is it just me, or has the New York Times become kind of bossy lately? Well, if you think they’re bossy, don’t read the comments section. There were numerous folks chiming in, touting their own regimens.
- Go as hard as you can… Just do it!
- Carry your groceries home from the store.
- Walk backward (which spurred its own lively debate).
- move to a 3/4/5-floor walkup, preferably at the top of a steep hill.
- One commenter hit the trifecta, with “hit the gym”, “blowout burn” and “use it or lose it” in the same post.
- And this advice (which we at FIFI do not recommend): walk up hills, skateboard down them.
There was one voice that saw the truth and wasn’t afraid to say it:
The comments: when did competitive aging become such a thing?
Yes to this! People spend a lot of time worrying and comparing and pushing and adding and tweaking, looking for the perfect alchemical formula for… what? Health? Fitness? Anti-aging? In fact, movement (which means walking for those of us who can, when we can) can be good and good for us.
When it comes to advice, though, sometimes there’s no school like the old school. Witness this comment:
A friend in Cleveland was advised to walk 6 miles a day by his doctor. After a month he called the doctor to ask how to get home from Detroit.
Don’t forget to tip your waitresses, folks…
How can something be this funny ( laughed out loud more than once) and this important at the same time? Great post!
My first-ever organized bike event was sort of a joke. The routes were 10 miles and 35 miles – or you could just go across the street to breakfast with a couple of county supervisors. Or just walk your bike around the block; no one was checking. And the t-shirt? No Pain, No Pain. This was during the No Pain, No Gain era.
I have been wearing that shirt for over 20 years now. I ride my bike thousands of miles every year, plus do all sorts of other physical activity, and I love that message! If it’s not fun, or too hard, or boring, or too easy, it’s pretty hard to keep it up. Just like clothes, there’s no one-size-fits-all.
I love this so much. The comment about “competitive aging” really made me realize how far I’ve come in my thinking since I started blogging about fitness almost 12 years ago. Back then I still had this sense of, if not quite competitive aging, an anxiety around “aging well” and thinking that it carried with it all sorts of imperatives (often couched in terms of “you’re doing it wrong, and we’ll tell you how to do it right” — a narrative structure that this NYT piece shows is still alive and well). Thank you for calling it out.
I suspect that juggling is also good for aging–in a non-competitive way–to keep our reflexes and coordination sharp. I have a love-hate with the whole step counting business. I often wish that no one had showed me where to find on my iPhone! I know I move enough. Intuitively.