100 steps a minute

I came along an article yesterday that I thought would be interesting to share: Strive for 100 steps a minute. Heath knows that I am embarking on a healthier lifestyle and he knows that I am blogging about it. I am not sure that he reads it though, which is just as well, because I blog about all my frustrations with him in my other blog: WobegonRabbit:My Ramblings, which can be accessed through this blog. Heath and I were discussing my treadmill use on Tuesday. He likes to kid around and told me that I was not going fast enough and maybe my short legs were holding me up and that he would walk faster-his legs are not that much longer than mine. His comments got me to thinking that maybe I am not going fast enough. I strive for 2.5-3.0 mph at the moment, with the majority of my time between 2.8-3.0. I plan to work on becoming faster in addition to adding time.

Right now, I am up to 23 minutes on the treadmill. Once I am at 30 minutes, I plan to focus solely on speed and incline. I do focus somewhat on speed, I have increase the amount of time I spend at 2.8-3.0mph significantly and only spend a warm up minute at 2.0 (to adjust everything-volume of TV/music, phone and remote in the cubbies, etc) and 2.5 for 3 minutes in the beginning and 1 minute at the end. So my thoughts were to search the Internet to see if there were guidelines to how fast one should walk. Much to my surprise, the next morning-one of Yahoo's teasers was referencing this article.

So, apparently one should be walking 100 steps a minute, which since 30 minutes of activity is advised, one should be walking 3000 steps in 30 minutes. That calculates to 1.5 miles in 30 minutes or 3.0mph. Apparently I am only doing that about 5-7 minutes of my time, so I need to speed it up. At the moment, when walking 3.0mph, I feel as though I am going to fall off and I have vision of lying unconscious on the floor. I hold on for dear life onto the side rails or the crosswalk arms. The article does recommend starting off slowly at 1000 steps for 10 minutes, which I shall try tonight.

One important note is that the study at San Diego State University was done in healthy young adults, not those who are obese or overweight. I think my decision to start slowly was advisable and one I would make to all my patients. If not because of the dangerousness of doing activity your body is unable to handle, but that if it is too hard in the beginning, then one is likely to give up and not want to continue. The days, I have not walked have been due to lack of sleep (on night float) and lack of time (the day trip to Myrtle Beach). My excuse has never been not wanting to walk on the treadmill because I did not enjoy it or I felt it was too difficult.

Of note, I have not read the actual study-my library does not have access to it. I plan to read it when it comes available an make comments as necessary.