08/25/2025
Betsy Taylor discusses counting your steps daily. Do you count your steps with your phone or pedometer? It is important that we keep moving even if you don't count your steps. Read more Rainy Day Writer articles on Your Radio Place and in Guernsey News.
Steps in Time by Betsy Taylor
“You have how many steps recorded on your phone?” I muttered in disbelief.
My husband repeated the number as I scowled.
“We walked the same distance on today’s city tour. How could you have logged so many more steps than I did?”
My husband and I were in Bergen, Norway and we wanted to learn as much about the country as possible while we moved from city to city. My favorite way to learn about an unfamiliar place is to walk around in it. It’s so much fun to scout streets with trappings of a foreign culture. It’s even better if a native guide escorts me while telling stories.
While my husband isn’t as thrilled about a long walk as I am, he occasionally goes along just to please me. Gotta appreciate that.
“How could I have walked more steps than you?” he wondered. “We went everywhere together.”
“I’m not accusing you of cheating, of rigging your phone’s counter.” I laughed at his bewildered expression.
That evening, we walked to a local restaurant, two miles round-trip with a stroll included for window shopping. Later, we examined our step counts, and I came up several hundred steps short. What’s up with that?
Well, you’ve probably solved the mystery of the missing steps. While it’s true that pedometers are unreliable when it comes to accuracy, there are other factors involved in the discrepancy. Despite my husband’s five-inch height advantage, my stride is longer than his. So, he takes more steps than I do over the same distance.
The benefit of exercise, like walking, is well-understood and accepted as a healthy practice. But the concept of counting steps taken during a 24-hour period as a benchmark is relatively new. And a benchmark of, say, 10,000 steps/day lets you congratulate yourself on a job well done.
Several years ago, when the 10,000 steps craze popped up, it swept the nation. Sales of pedometers skyrocketed, and phone apps became widely employed. My phone app is a window called health. It monitors hours of sleep, calories burned, steps/day, and “trends.” Trends records if I’m walking more or less than usual. The little tattletale scolds me if I’m not walking as far as I did yesterday, or last week, or even last year.
Certainly, steps count (pun intended). But steps alone don’t define healthy movement especially for older adults like me. Kitchen dancing is a fun way to work in a little cardio. While pushing a mop, you can turn up your music and move your feet to the beat. An added benefit is that your mop handle can act like a walking stick and stabilize your groove while you move. Plus, you get a clean kitchen floor.
For more good ideas, check out page 21of the June/July 2025 issue of the AARP Magazine. The one-page article shows us how to “Run a Mile Without Running.” The whole plan takes 10 minutes, and you can do it in your living room.
To my way of thinking, the bottom line about exercise is that it must fit naturally into your day. Walking is about as natural as it gets. If you don’t want to count steps, don’t. Just move.
Finally, you might wonder if I join “trends” in shaming myself if I fall short of my exercise goal. The answer is – I don’t. I do check my numbers out of habit and give myself a little back-pat if I score well. If I don’t, well, Scarlet O’Hara said it best. “After all, tomorrow is another day.”
