![]() As you go higher, air pressure decreases. You can add hundreds of steps while driving your car for an hour or less.īecause most trackers measure when you’re walking up stairs or an incline, they use a combination of motion sensors and sensors that detect air pressure. For example, riding in a car, bus, train, or subway can create motions that are interpreted as steps. Vibrations that affect all or part of your body can also result in inaccurate step counts. It’s not just intentional motions that can be misinterpreted, however. Using devices that vibrate - such as a random orbital sander that you’d use on a woodworking project - can cause your tracker to log hundreds of steps in just a few minutes. Washing your hands, preparing food, petting your cat, or using a computer mouse can also result in steps being registered by your device. More subtle movements can also cause errors. For example, banging on nails with a hammer can create vibrations that may be close enough to step motions that the data is misinterpreted as walking. When your fitness band interprets the data from its motion sensors, it is supposed to ignore motions that are not associated with walking. In other words, what you see isn’t necessarily what you walked. Because these sensors generate so much data that must be sifted through and interpreted by the device’s controller, results can often be misinterpreted and badly reported. Some also use gyroscopes to determine the direction and rotational movement. Today’s fitness bands use multiaxis inertial sensors called accelerometers to detect when the device is moving. ![]() Part of the reason is based on how they work. In fact, your counts can differ widely depending on which brand you’re using. The sad truth is that these devices can undercount or overcount the number of steps that you take in a day. Just because they tell you that you’ve reached your daily goal doesn’t mean that you actually took that many steps. If you’re one of the many people who wears a fitness band or smartwatch to count your steps, you may not be aware of one inescapable fact: they lie. ![]() "Improved health and wellbeing translates to better health, better mood, and better sex.How many steps did you take today? Are you sure? How do you know? "Bank a daily brisk walk of 20 to 30 minutes each day, the logged mileage builds," says Dr. And in this COVID-era, your overall step count may be lower as you work from home and miss out on other daily opportunities for activity. Ultimately, getting in any movement is better than none. "The benefits of exercise are now even being better understood in immuno-compromised populations, like those managing prostate cancer and non-Hodgkins lymphoma." "With regular exercise we see decreased overall body weight, blood pressure, bad (LDL and total) cholesterol-with increases in good and protective (HDL) cholesterol and better insulin sensitivity," says Dr. Knowing your steps means knowing your daily mileage."Īnd ultimately, making sure you're meeting your marks will lead to better overall health (if that's how you've decided to train, of course). "Take for example that the American Heart Association recommends 30 minutes of exercise each day for cardiovascular health-that translates to about 1.5 miles of walking. "Knowing your personal performance metrics is a strong driver for improvement, and one that I leverage at Columbia RunLab," says Dr. They want to be able to quantify those steps even further, helping them to understand exactly what they're doing, including how far they're walking and more. The concept of step tracking can be a great way to have a baseline understanding about how active you are overall-from walks, to runs, to other types of workouts, the number your pedometer spits out is a reflection of everything you do.īut for some people, the step count really comes down to how many times the put one foot in front of the other. Whether you're into tracking your daily steps or not, knowing how many steps you take each day and how far you've traveled can be great indicators of your overall health. ![]() After all, an entire industry of gadgets sprung up around the guidance that hitting 10,000 steps a day could be the key to getting healthy.Īccording to the Mayo Clinic, the average American gets in 3,000 to 4,000 steps each day (that's probably lower than ideal, for the record). Step counts can be a serious preoccupation for most people who pay attention to their fitness tracker or smart phone.
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