"It doesn't count unless it's a proper walk"

There's a quieter version of the last two beliefs. Fine, walking counts. But a walk means a walk. Boots, a route, an hour on a Sunday. The ten minutes to the shop with a bag isn't a walk. It's an errand.

The legs don't know the difference. A mile to the shop and a mile round the park are the same mile to the muscles, the heart and the step counter. What differs is what you call it, and what you call it decides whether you do it, which is why this belief matters. If only proper walks count, the proper walk gets planned for Sunday, and the week has thirty short trips in it that all go by car because they don't count.

The NHS walking page is written entirely about errand walks. Its list of ways to walk more is walking part of your journey to work, walking to the shops, using the stairs instead of the lift, leaving the car behind for short journeys, walking the kids to school. There's a stroll after dinner on the list too, but the rest is transport. The official advice isn't asking you to find an hour. It's asking you to use your legs for the trips you're making anyway.

The Department for Transport's survey of how people in England travel counts walking in two ways. A walking trip is a journey made entirely on foot. A walking stage is the on-foot part of a longer journey, the walk to the station or from the car park. In 2024, people made about two hundred and sixty-seven walking trips each on average and walked about two hundred and thirty miles, which is the highest the survey has recorded since 2002. Most of those trips are short. Only eighty-one of the two hundred and sixty-seven were a mile or more. The country's walking is mostly errand walking, and it's the errand walking that's been rising.

So keep the Sunday walk if you like it. It's a good thing. But the week is where the distance is, and the week is made of errands. A person who walks to the shop five times and up the stairs ten times has done more for their legs than a person who does one proper walk and drives everything else, and the first person didn't have to find an hour to do it. There's a book in this series for people whose problem is the proper session that never happens, and it's named in the notes. This one is about the trips that were happening already.