So what is the best way to measure walking as a fitness activity?

Welcome to Walking is Fitness.

This is a podcast of action providing a little extra motivation to help you keep that fitness promise you made to yourself.

Hi, I'm Dave. I started walking for fitness in 2013. Still take an intentional fitness

walk every single day. And I would love to have you join me for the next 10 minutes.

One of my favorite quotes, because I keep mentioning it, and I think it was Peter Drucker,

the business management expert, who once said,

what gets measured, gets improved. In other words, if you're doing something, an activity that

you want to improve, get better, you need to start by measuring it.

Because the measuring makes you at minimum aware of where you are and perhaps even where you want to be.

And so when it comes to walking as a fitness activity, there are three basic ways that we can measure

our progress.

And each has an opportunity for improvement.

So number one, and probably the most common, is we count our steps.

Actually, we don't do the counting because that would be really obnoxious. One, two, three, four, five, six, don't talk to me, ten, eleven, twelve, I'm doing something.

Could you imagine?

We wear a step tracker, maybe it's a Fitbit, Apple Watch, Garmin, or whatever you use. This was how I measured my progress for really almost

eight years. And the biggest benefit of tracking my steps was it made fitness an all-day activity instead of something that I set aside time for

at a particular part of the day I was thinking about how many steps I had and and ultimately about fitness

the entire day I was aware of how many steps I had, and I was looking for opportunities to get more steps.

I was finding pockets of time throughout my day that I had never thought were opportunities to move.

Like, you take the car to get an oil change and you sit in the waiting room.

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