Where the ten minutes goes

A rule that says "do ten minutes" is easy to agree with and easy to forget. Short sessions have a weakness that long ones don't. Because they're small, they have no place in the diary, and things with no place in the diary tend not to happen. This chapter is about giving the ten minutes somewhere to live.

Lally's habit study from chapter 8 has a detail worth bringing out. The volunteers didn't only choose a behaviour. They chose a behaviour to do in the same context every day, such as after breakfast. Repeating the behaviour in a consistent context was what made it more automatic over time. The point of a cue is that you don't have to remember or decide. One thing finishes, and the next thing starts.

So choose an anchor, something that already happens every day at a roughly fixed time, and attach the ten minutes to it. Here are some that work for a lot of people, offered as examples.

You could go straight out after the first cup of tea in the morning, before the day has a chance to get at you.

You could take the second half of your lunch break. Eat first, then walk for ten minutes and come back. It also tends to improve the afternoon.

You could use the moment you get home. That's the Tuesday slot. Before you take your coat off, go back out of the door for ten minutes. Once the coat's off, you're in for the evening.

You could use the time while the dinner's in the oven. Ten minutes of stairs or floor movements fit inside most cooking times.

There's also the school run or the station. Park ten minutes' walk away, or get off a stop early, and the ten minutes is built into a journey you were making anyway.

That last one is part of a larger point, which is that a good deal of movement needn't be set aside as exercise at all. I-Min Lee and colleagues studied 16,741 American women with an average age of 72, who wore a step counter for a week and were then followed for about four years. The women were divided into four groups by daily steps. The least active group averaged about 2,700 steps a day. The next group up averaged about 4,400, and their risk of death during the study was 41 per cent lower. Risk went on falling with more steps until about 7,500 a day, where it levelled off. The authors remark that the popular target of 10,000 steps has limited scientific basis. When they looked at walking speed, it mattered much less than the total once steps were accounted for.

The usual cautions about observational studies apply, and these were older women, so the numbers may differ for you. But look at how small the difference is between the bottom two groups. It's about 1,700 steps, which for most people is fifteen minutes or so of walking spread over a day. That's a walk to the post box, the far end of the car park and the stairs at work. It's another steep-at-the-bottom curve, and another 10,000-style threshold that turned out not to be where the benefit starts.

A few practical things make the ten minutes more likely to happen. These are my own suggestions.

Keep a pair of shoes you can walk briskly in wherever your anchor is, by the front door or under your desk. It removes the last bit of overhead.

Have a default route that takes five minutes out and five minutes back. Work it out once so that you never have to think about where to go.

Have a wet-weather default as well. It might be the stairs, the living-room floor or a multi-storey car park. If you've only planned for dry days, you'll skip the wet ones.

Decide on three options in advance, and no more. For example, the walk, the stairs and the floor routine. At twenty to seven on a bad Tuesday you don't want to be designing a session. You want to pick from a short menu.

And keep the gym bag packed, if you use a gym. The full session is still there for the days that can hold it.