"I'm on my feet all day"

A lot of readers have an answer ready, and it's that they're already active. They're on their feet all day. Teaching, nursing, the shop floor, the kitchen, a house with small children. Whatever the desk workers need, it isn't them.

I'd separate two things. Being on your feet is standing, and standing is better than sitting, but it isn't stepping. A person can stand for eight hours and cover very little ground, and it's the ground that the step studies measure. A nursery worker walks a lot. A person behind a counter mostly doesn't. The feeling of being active comes from being upright and busy, and it's an honest feeling, and it's a poor guide to distance.

The best way to find out is to measure a day. Most phones count steps whether you've asked them to or not, and a pedometer is cheap. Wear it for a normal working day and look at the number in the evening. I'd expect it to surprise you in one direction or the other. Some people on their feet all day find eleven thousand and can skip this book. More find four or five thousand, which is the bottom quartile in the large step studies, and a good deal less than the feeling suggested.

Amanda Paluch and colleagues, in 2022, pooled fifteen studies with over forty-seven thousand adults, and split them into quarters by steps. The medians of the four quarters were about three and a half thousand, five thousand eight hundred, seven thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand steps a day. Risk of death fell across the quarters, steeply at first. The benefit levelled off around six to eight thousand for people over sixty, and eight to ten thousand for younger adults, and the researchers found little evidence for the ten thousand figure that's been repeated for decades. So the target, if you want one, is lower than you've heard. But the bottom quarter, where a lot of people on their feet all day turn out to be, is where the biggest gains are waiting.

I'm not going to ask you to hit a number. I'm asking you to find out what your number is, because "on my feet all day" is a description of posture and the studies are about distance, and the two come apart more often than you'd think. If yours is low, the errand walks in this book are the easiest way there is to raise it, because they replace something you were already doing.