Hello friends. Welcome to walking as fitness. I'm David Paul this week. Walking your dog is not exercise.

I deceive myself. I walk almost 20,000 steps a day, ride a bike most afternoons for about an hour,

lift weight several mornings a week, and even do high-intensity workout for 15 minutes on those

mornings when I'm not doing the strength training. I'm in great shape. And then I take a rake

and I stir up the mulch in our gardens and my body tells me the truth. Earlier this morning,

I did just that job and discovered that I'm clearly not in the kind of shape that I think I am.

Now, I've actually been working on being relentlessly honest with myself, and I think I'm getting better, but I still have more work to do.

And why is this important? Because

our deepest beliefs drive our actions or inactions. The artwork this morning

revealed an area of my fitness that is weak. I'm not entirely sure what that is

but I cannot continue to believe that the exercise I'm doing is all I need.

I may need to do something different, something that might be uncomfortable and that I don't like as much.

For a long time, I've believed that every one of my 20,000 steps is exercise.

I even said as much in the early days of this podcast.

I no longer believe that.

In fact, I now believe that very few of my steps rise to that level. Now, to be clear,

every step is beneficial. Lots of research telling us that sitting is bad and movement is good.

There are health benefits to all those steps. But to reach the level, the CDC recommends, which is 150 minutes of moderate level activity, I need to be moving

at a certain speed for a certain amount of time. And I'm not always doing that. As I recently

said, I have to intentionally walk faster to get my heart

rate up enough to count as exercise. Consistent exercise unlocks even more health benefits.

And that brings me to the point of this podcast. Unless you're walking your dog at three

...