Happy New Year. Guess what? I'm making a change to the podcast. 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've been walking

for fitness since 2013, averaging about 21,000 steps a day. I'm walking right now and I would

love to have you join me for the next 10 minutes. Let's start with what is not changing.

The podcast is still going to be called Walking is Fitness.

It will still be 10 minutes.

It'll still be a daily podcast.

And I will continue to be the person that you're walking with.

And yes, I will continue to walk as I record the podcast. None of that is changing.

This change is something that I've been considering for months, actually, and at the risk of

sounding a little self-indulgent, I want to give you the reason why I'm making this change.

So there's a little bit about today's episode that is revealing how the sausage is made.

And, you know, some of us love that kind of behind-the-scenes stuff.

Others are like, I don't care how it's made, just cook it up and put it on my plate and let me enjoy it.

Podcast experts all say that the first minute, maybe even less, is the most important part of a podcast

because that's when listeners are making the decision to keep listening or to just

shut it down and move on to something else. And so in that first minute, you need to let listeners

know what the episode is about and a little bigger picture what the podcast is about. And so

within the first minute actually takes me a little bit less. I give you a

preview of the episode. In this case, there's a change coming, so you know what the episode is about.

And then I go into that opening that pretty much has stayed consistent for almost since the beginning of the

...