One small step for you, one giant leap for your wellbeing

As a doctor I get asked sometimes how many steps a day we should walk.

With our mobiles fixed in our pockets counting each moment we plant our feet throughout our day, it is all too easy to get obsessed with one particular walking metric.

10,000 steps a day was all the buzz a few years back. As I say to my patients, this is an arbitrary number plucked from the halls of marketing rather than science.

Yamasa Corporation, a Japanese company, built a new step-tracker off the momentum of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The pedometer’s brand name Manpo-Kei means “10,000 step meter” in English and the associated marketing campaign peddled the notion that 10,000 steps should be the daily aim.

In May 2019 a study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine. This looked at the relationship between step count and mortality in women aged 62 and above.

The study of more than 16,000 women found that those who averaged 4,400 steps per day had a 41 percent lower mortality rate than women who averaged 2,700 daily steps. Mortality rates were progressively lower with more steps taken before tapering off interestingly at 7,500 steps per day.

Another study came up with 9,500 steps as the magic number for overweight or obese adults to improve their cardiovascular health. It showed that averaging 9,500 or more daily steps led to a 2 percent body fat and an increase in HDL (“good”) cholesterol after 3 months.

‘So how many steps then is it doc?’

Before I answer that, let’s consider what walking can give us without even taking a single step. As well as all the physical health benefits which are well known about, there are two important wellbeing lessons that walking reveals to us, which I am ever grateful for.

The first lesson is in the evolution of this skill. With a giant Pampers weighing us down we try to take our first literal baby steps. We falter. The nappy cushions us. We get back up. We do this without probably much conscious thought; if you fall you instinctively know to get back up. That is until we become a little older. Fear and anxiety can dampen this instinct until it is just a dim hue within us. Setbacks as adults aren’t as easily remedied, but if we can reconnect with this instinct later in life then it will serve us well.

The second wellbeing lesson walking shows us is one which I have particularly embraced this past one year: take one step at a time. Even if you want to take more, as a bipedal creature you can’t.

I had a knee injury in 2019 which rendered me unable to walk without crutches for a couple of months. Unfortunately 4 months ago I missed the last step on the way down at the train station and my knee went, for lack of better description, crunch. I was given another shiny pair of crutches and was grateful that I had muscle memory from being aided by them in 2019 so as to not leave my arms sore in the first days. The injury was as you can imagine highly frustrating for someone who loves to walk above most other things, but I recall looking down at my feet on one of these slow crutch filled days and realising that when it came to my frustration, when it came to the mounting task list that had gathered whilst I had been incapacitated, when it came to life — I was being forced to take it one step at a time. And in that moment I appreciated how beautiful that truly is…

‘But, how many steps?’

If you want to improve your wellbeing then the answer is in two parts, firstly: do as many steps as you can. Bear in mind that current guidelines recommend that we engage in 30 minutes of moderate exercise (gets the heart rate up) 5 times a week, or 15 minutes of vigorous activity (think sweating) 5 times a week. Although there are many forms of exercise that are also very beneficial for our health such as strength training, yoga and cycling, walking for most people can form a staple part of meeting these targets. Goal orientated exercise tends to help with motivation so if having a daily target helps you to push yourself that little bit extra then 10,000 steps is great.

The second part of the answer is: walk with gratitude.

For me, I love walking. I wonder sometimes if this makes me less interesting than most when I honestly say that walking is my favourite pastime.

I have aimed to do 20,000 steps a day this summer. This is because it amounts to around 3 hours of walking, and 3 hours in the sun makes me ever so happy. I make at least one of my walks each day a gratitude walk, and you really should too.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept, a gratitude walk involves walking whilst practising gratitude. You walk, you are present, you observe your environment and focus on a few things that you see, or internally feel grateful for. And of course, you then think of why you are grateful for these things. You gain the scientifically proven benefits of walking and benefits of gratitude practice including stress relief, improving your mood, better sleep, more self esteem, and even lower blood pressure — a combination of wins!

You do not need to walk for 3 hours, just a focused 10 minutes can be impactful.

Walking through one of the royal parks recently on my daily gratitude walk I felt grateful for the uncontrollable laughter of a group of children around me, taking me back to the carefree emotions of my own precious school summer holidays. I felt grateful for each sip of my decaf flat white, allowing me to embrace the joyful aroma of coffee without having to deal with the jitters that a loaded caffeinated drink can bring me. And finally I felt so grateful to see a tiny white butterfly floating around me — making me feel connected to nature, despite being in the middle of a large city, and recognising the tranquillity that this brings.

I tend to record moments from my gratitude walks using Gratitube app — our video gratitude journaling app. This way on a rainy September day like this I can look back on gratitude memories and get a boost of positivity.

Gratitude walks don’t have to just involve observations. You can walk and think of things in your life generally that you feel grateful for and why e.g. your family, your home, a treasured memory. You may find yourself being grateful for the same things repeatedly on your walks — that is great as it just reinforces that particular aspect of your gratitude. A negative thought may enter your mind as you walk but this doesn’t have to interrupt your positive wellbeing experience. You can embed this in your gratitude practice by being grateful for the ability to recognise negative thoughts, what you can learn from them, and ultimately for the fact that they will pass.

You don’t have to go it alone. You can walk in pairs or in a group, and if you feel comfortable sharing then you can inspire each other with your gratitude practice. You can strengthen your relationships by expressing direct gratitude for the others who are by your side — expressing gratitude to others forms an important pillar of gratitude practice.

If you are finding it tricky to get going, some universal themes on a gratitude walk are simply feeling grateful to have the time to be walking. Another is being grateful for the ability to walk. My time on crutches has forever cemented this for me. Perhaps like me you can feel grateful to be reminded of taking life one step at a time when it becomes all too noisy thus protecting us against the risk of feeling weighed down — an antidote to overwhelm. When you see a wobbly child in the park who is still mastering their stride, perhaps there is gratitude in the lesson of remembering that when we get knocked down, let’s not lose touch with getting ourselves back up..

Try a gratitude walk this week and even better make it a part of your daily wellbeing routine — the results will follow very quickly and you’ll soon be citing walking as one of your favourite past times also.