So, this 10,000 steps a day thing (no, I’m not thinking of doing it. Rather, just seen it again and pondering it).
So, average human footstep is 2.5 feet, 30 inches (for men at least). 10,000 steps is thus 25,000 feet, which is 14 miles, isn’t it?
Ah, yes, Timmy and numbers. It’s 1720 (-ish) yards, not feet, to the mile. So, 14/3, = 5 miles a day.
Hmm, OK, reasonable enough as a bit of exercise I guess……
I used to jog one mile a day. Problem was, after a month I was 30 miles from home.
I’ll get me coat…..
Wasn’t the 10k figure chosen because tge japanese character for ten thousand looked like walking man . The makers of the pedometer thought it was apt.
Essentially correct. Nice, round number. Arbitrary.
I’ve read it was because one of the early step counters had 4 digits. 9,999 steps plus 1 brought the counter neatly back to zero.
2,000 steps = 1,000 paces, or in Latin “milia passuum”, which is where we get our word “mile”. When I was aiming for 10,000 steps a day I found that my 2.000 steps coincided almost exactly with 1 mile, a connection going back 2,000 years which I found oddly satisfying. Can’t do that with these newfangled kilometres, can you? 🙂
Nobody writes songs about kilometres either. “I would walk 804.672 kilometres” or “Moon river, wider than 1.60934 kilometers” don’t have the same ring to them.
Yes, exactly the same for me 1,264 steps to the km.
The boffins have been trying to work out the optimum. As you go from 0 to 4-7,000 daily steps substantial gains in disease protection are observed, the gains continue as you do more steps but at a much lower rate.
Then again I haven’t seen any headlines saying how fast you should do them. You’d expect under an hour for 7000 imv
The optimum varies from person to person – and the estimate varies from boffin to boffin. The 10,000 steps is a marketing slogan like “five a day” and mostly harmless although almost all boffins think that all the benefit will be gained from fewer than 10,000.
The big problem with it being 10,000 is that its too much for a lot of people. Both in distance and time taken. It puts them off and so they do zero. Medics suggest 5,000 could be a better target as this would result in a lot less people in that zero bracket.
It’s the people in that zero bracket who are most as risk. Even doing a few hundred steps every few days would be a big improvement for them.
OK, it is *mostly* harmless as a few people will regard it as an “all or nothing” choice. But anyone who thinks that you have to go out daily on a five-mile walk is mistaken – the 10,000 steps include walking from your bed to the breakfast table, to the front door, to the bus stop or train station, from the bus/train to the factory or office, to the canteen and back at lunch-time, your journey home …
My wife averages over 10,000 steps a day despite in some weeks only having one walk longer than five miles.
Yes. We walk the dog about 2 to 2.5 miles each morning. After that, getting to 4 miles is a breeze, which the pedometer app on my iPhone says it’s about 10,000 steps. I suspect the step measurement is not very accurate, but I’ve checked the mileage against my bike’s odometer and my car’s and they’re all pretty close.
The best estimate I’ve seen is that after 7,500 daily steps the benefit of doing more rapidly diminishes. After hammering 10,000 daily during the Covid madness I now do 8,000 or a bit below.
Eight furlongs to a mile, and a furlong is 220 yards: which is the calculation I use to recall that there are 1,760 yards in a mile if I momentarily forget.
A furlong is ten chains, and a chain is 22 yards – the length of a cricket pitch: which is the calculation to use if you can’t remember the number of yards in a furlong.
If you have no interest in either cricket or horse racing, then you are presumably not British, so the length of a mile is of no concern to you anyway.
Except for us Americans, who wisely don’t care about cricket.
And the horses can go to the glue factory.
Related, a gallon is 231 cu. in. which means just about 7½ gallons to the cubit foot.
UK, or US gallon?
I imp gallon = 277.419 in³
USians standardized their measures before the Brits (The Weights and Measures Act of 1824 and1878) , so they’re stuck with a hodgepodge of incompatible units.
Real gallons.
And the real weight unit is the ton.
You still have acres, which are a chain wide and a furlong long. And your gallons are wrong. You use what was a regional gallon measure in England. Bristol, IIRC, which Tim would tell you must be bad.
That well known expert on everything Captain Potato opined that walking was THE best exercise. Obviously he holds that opinion because it’s the only exercise he does.
I did offer my opinion that that was why he held his opinion, that walking was better than nothing and good for anyone who couldn’t do anything else and that, besides, waddling along looking at ducks barely qualified as walking as an exercise. But he didn’t want to engage in a discussion.
In my last job, before I retired, I would often walk more than 10 miles during the course of the day. By the time I had been a homebody for a couple of months I had gained four kgs.
Mr Worstall… I’m truly shocked that a man of your age didn’t realise that a mile was 1,760 yards, or 5,280 feet, or 63,360 inches for that matter – numbers that were drummed into us at junior school, if not before!
I’ve a sneaking suspicion that Tim is just of an age where, with the right choice of school, he might not have been subjected to that rigor of imperial measurements.
Slightly odd really. I never did learn the alphabet – in terms of having to speak it out – nor my times tables (I still use little mental tricks to work them out, calculating them if you like, not knowing them. Some I do actually know, 12×12 perhaps, then I work from there to whatever it is being asked) nor grammar in any language, not even English, nor Imperial measurements nor….whole great gaping chasms in my education for some reason.
I can sing the alphabet, but I very much doubt that I could recite it without falling into some kind of syncopated rhythm.
And about the third time that a nun tried to teach me how to diagram a sentence I just gave up.
I remember very fun time when I was at Forbes. A journalism professor turned up in my comments and started shouting about my grammar (fair point!). Insisted I “diagram the sentence” as you say. He went truly incandescent when I pointed out that I didn’t even know what he meant, let alone how to do it.
Must admit I’ve never heard of diagramming a sentence either.
It’s remarkable what you can find when you search the net!!
I remember having to diagram sentences. If ever something was made to make a kid hate school that might take the cake.
Sorry TD, things that made me hate school (in no particular order) included matrices, cross country running, past participles, Venn diagrams, algebra, slide rules, rugby, sadistic teachers, the box containing shorts and shirts for when you didn’t bring your sports kit because it was ‘in the wash’ (Kes…), the after sports showers, the size 10 white plimsoll with a stick man drawn on the bottom with chalk (if the stick man didn’t come out on the arse of your trousers after you were hit with it you got another one). Oh happy days…..
Agree. All of the above.
Prompted by you comment I have just looked it up. I too had never heard of it before. I now know how to do it but don’t have a clue why drawing horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines adds value.
Like most ways of parsing text it falls over the classic:
“Time flies like an arrow.”
I, also, have just looked it up – what a waste of space! Pictures for kids (and American professors) who aren’t good at words.
I cannot remember when I was taught how to structure an English sentence but it must have been before I was 10 because I do remember that I was taught how to structure a Latin sentence when I was 9.
It’s a Yank thing.
Journalism professor isn’t a real job.
Screw the distance. Screw the number of steps. Gamecock walks for an HOUR a day, five days a week.
Dreadful shortage of taxis where some people live…
I have a Garmin watch that sets a modest daily step target and bumps it up slightly for the next day if you achieve it. It also keeps a tally of hitting the target on consecutive days. By the time you have hit the target for fifteen consecutive days the target is nearing about twenty thousand so you have to go for medium length walks if you want to keep it going.
Today I’ve been swimming and then walked a few laps of the indoor running track at the gym. That and just general walking around has clocked up six thousand steps by mid afternoon. If I wanted to do ten thousand a day I wouldn’t have to do much extra walking to make it.
I was told: you should walk daily enough to get out of breath. I’ve just come up the stairs from the kitchen, so that’s today’s done.
For normal human beings that will extend the distance, very marginally, every day until you give up because you are very hungry or it’s too dark to see where you are going.
I have several times walked until it was dark without getting out of breath.
Apparently the gains to moving about to the tune of 10,000 steps a day is a sigmoid function. Almost no benefits at 1500 to 2000 steps or less, very marginal gains over about 7000 to 8,000 steps.
My semi-retirement sinecure involves me calling up Prague to submit electricity bids/offers between 11:00 a.m. and noon. That’s 5:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. New York time, and i, unfortunately, live in New York.
So, after phoning in my bids, I walk to Barney Greengrass The King Of Sturgeon everyday for breakfast. It’s a nice convenient 30 blocks away, which is a mile and a half each way.
Gotta say, that’s a cute sinecure….