Averaging pedometer steps is a great way to balance the effects of different activity levels between your days. For instance if you work in a sedentary role these days may lead to a low pedometer steps total whereas your non-working activity level may lead to high step counts.
One walker I know, found extreme differences in the steps recorded between days at work depending upon the tasks for those days. Days with a lot of sitting led to 3,000 steps where other days performing a standard task which required physical movement could lead to 17,000 steps.
This happens often and is the reason that recording and averaging over several days is the best method for most people to effectively use pedometer walking.
Aiming generally for the daily 10,000+ steps most walking for weight loss programs recommend, will move your activity for that day to the active level. It usually also leads to weight loss.
Starting out you will need to wear a pedometer while pursuing your daily tasks normally. Having established a baseline for your activity this way, it becomes easy to set a pedometer steps target to progressivley move you closer to the 10,000 pedometer steps ideal.
Sometimes though becoming aware of exactly how little some days’ pedometer steps total, is discouraging even to the point of giving up.
Giving up is not the answer.
This is how using an average of daily pedometer steps based on a suitable time period ( weekly or 5 days, for instance) allows you to do what you can on inactive days and put as much extra walking into those days which lend themselves to activity.
Finding your starting point is important and allows you to increase your target steps on a doable basis.
As an example:
If your initial average daily pedometer steps is 3,000 then increasing it by 500 steps for the next period requires only 5 minutes extra walking a day. Generally if possible start by doing 20 minutes of additional walking each day which will add around 2,000 steps at the recommended walking rate of 3,000 steps in 30 minutes. Once you have successfully added 20 minutes walking once a day, add another 20 minute daily walk if possible.
The result here is going from a base level of 3,000 pedometer steps to 5,000 steps to 7,000 steps.
Averaging:
Assume that you as a new walker who has a full time job and household/family commitments have managed to add one walk 3 times during the week, and sometimes an hour’s walk on the weekend. A normal weekend day is generally busy and you do around 6,000 steps.
The results for pedometer steps is:
3 days of 5,000 steps (includes a 20 minute walk); 2 work days unaltered of 3,000 steps; 1 weekend day including a one hour walk of 12,000 steps; 1 weekend day of 6,000 steps. Total: 39,000 steps.
Average Daily Steps: 5,571
Setting Target:
As a general rule add 10% to your previous steps daily average. In this case, this would be 6,128 and you might like to round it up and make it 6,200. By adding 629 additional daily steps- this is approximately 6.5 minutes of extra pedometer walking- and the new target is easily met.
Possible Scedule:
Every day this next week you will need to add a 5 minute walk (3 days- 2 at work and 1 on the weekend), walk for 25 minutes (3 work days) and for 65 minutes (1 weekend day).
Or some variation of the above.
Averaging pedometer steps is a great way to deal with varying results over different days.
April 14th, 2010 at 1:54 pm
Interesting article i totally agree with the comments above. Keep writing