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| Get Your 10,000 Steps: Step Counter Review --by Joan Price ©Joan Price. May not be reprinted without permission. This is my favorite fitness tool! Exercise physiologist Alice Lockridge introduced me to the step counter, which measures the steps you take during exercise or over the course of a day. Clip this tiny (about 1-1/2 x 2 inches) tool to your belt or waistband in the morning, wear it all day, and see how many steps you accumulate, and, in some models, miles covered and calories burned. You're aiming for at least 10,000 steps a day, which, according to Stanford University and the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research, yields health benefits. How does the step counter work? A movement mechanism measures vertical accelerations of the hip, a.k.a. footstrikes or steps. Here's what I learned from wearing it for a week: A normal workday spent mostly at the computer, including walking around my home office and walking a couple of errands in town, but not making a conscious effort to exercise, logged only 3,000 to 4,000 steps. (No wonder I gain weight during intense writing deadlines!) Taking a 45-minute walk with a friend in the afternoon and a 1-1/4 hour walk with another friend in the evening brought me to a whopping 18,000 steps that day. I had accumulated only 4,000 on one of my write-all-day workdays. Then I went West Coast Swing dancing in the evening. 1-1/2 hours of enthusiastic dancing brought me up to 11,000 steps. My line dancing classes net 7,000 steps in two hours -- and everyone is having too much fun to realize they're exercising. My best was a particularly active day which ended with 3 hours of two-stepping and line-dancing my way through a country/western dance: 21,300 steps. I was delighted at this proof that you don't have to spend your time on a treadmill to get plenty of exercise. Realize that a step counter won't count exercise that doesn't involve taking steps (weight training, rowing, abs, Pilates, yoga, etc.). But if your main exercise is running, walking, any form of dance, or working out on an elliptical trainer or stair stepper, this is a really cool tool. You'll find it makes you want to move more, because you know every step is counted. It's also a good get-off-your-tush motivator for a sedentary person who needs to see how each small step counts--literally!
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October
2007 update: After years of trying one pedometer after another, I’ve
finally found my favorite: the