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Harvard Heart Letter | February 2008
Heart Beat: Pedometer-powered walking
Interested
in walking an extra mile a day? Get a pedometer and clip it to your
belt. The silent tally of your daily steps may be all you need to take
more of them.
Exercise gurus have been promoting the use of
pedometers for years. These small, pager-sized devices clock every step
a person takes. To see if they really help people get more physical
activity, Stanford University researchers looked at the results of the
26 best pedometer studies conducted so far. The simple act of wearing
one added more than 2,000 steps a day. At an average step length of 2.5
feet, that’s an extra mile.
You can buy a pedometer for
under $5. Wear it for a week or so to get a handle on how active you
are. Once you’ve figured out your average daily steps, the device can
help motivate you to take more. If you aren’t very active, try adding
an extra 200 steps a day each week. Some exercise experts suggest a
daily goal of 10,000 steps, but that’s an arbitrary number that is too
high for some people and too low for others. However many you take, try
to include an uninterrupted stretch of brisk walking each day.
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