Monitoring Your Progress With A Pedometer
Monday, August 30th, 2010Walking is a great exercise for getting in shape, losing weight and achieving a whole host of major health benefits. It’s a low impact workout that doesn’t require any special equipment, training or expertise. You can do it wherever you like and there are no expensive monthly gym membership fees to pay. You can slot it into your daily schedule whenever it’s best for you. Do it in one session or break it into a number of shorter sessions between other activities. It’s entirely up to you.
One piece of essential equipment for walking is a good comfortable pair of shoes. If your shoes give you blisters or are uncomfortable, then sticking to your walking exercise plan will be difficult. So be certain that you have a good pair that fits you well. If you like, you could get some of the latest designs of fitness shoes which help to raise the amount of work that your lower body muscles perform whilst walking normally.
There are a variety of different makes on the market – Skechers Shape Ups, Reeboks Easy Tones, Fit flops exercise sandals and Masai Barefoot Technology are amongst the best known and most popular – but new brands are appearing on the market all the time. They do have some slight differences, but the common thread running through the various designs seems to be a specially designed sole which raises the amount of work performed by the muscles in your legs and butt. This boosts the effectiveness of your workout and helps you in getting the maximum return from your walking exercise program.
The majority of health professionals recommend a target of 10,000 steps daily in order to obtain the numerous health benefits achievable. A lot of people find a pedometer to be a useful motivational aid which helps to encourage them to increase their step count and get closer to the target figure. Pedometers are fairly inexpensive today but, if you believe that having one would help you to keep your motivation up, then you should be sure to get a decent quality one.
Recent studies showed a high percentage of pedometers to be inaccurate - with errors as high as 50% in some cases. The general trend seemed to be for inaccurate pedometers to overestimate the number of steps taken – so someone who was taking 5,000 steps a day might mistakenly believe that they were hitting the 10,000 step target value. This is because cheaper pedometers usually use a hairspring technology which is factory calibrated during manufacture. These become ever less accurate as the pedometer ages – with a growing tendency to overestimate the number of steps as the spring weakens being the outcome.
Better models employ coiled spring technology and dual accelerometer sensors which means that they have greater accuracy, a longer lifespan and that they can be carried in your pocket or a bag instead of being worn on your belt. An Omron pedometer typically has an accuracy of plus or minus 5%. Other quality brands include Taneka, Yamax and New Lifestyles.
Should you wish to find out just how accurate your pedometer is, there are two very simple tests which you can perform. The first is to simply count out 100 steps and compare it with what your pedometer has recorded. The second test method is to take a note of the reading on your pedometer just before you first sit down – at your desk at work perhaps – and then to check it again after being seated for thirty minutes or so. If your step count increases significantly as a result of your normal movements whilst seated then it will certainly artificially inflate your daily step count.
These days, the majority of pedometers are digital. They generally have a memory and you can usually see your results for a week long period – which is handy if you wish to keep tabs on your progress. More and more of them even allow you to load your results into a PC using a USB connection so that you can monitor your results over a longer period of time. You can normally change the way in which your results are displayed as well. Take your choice from the total number of steps taken, the number of calories burned or the distance covered – whichever helps you to keep your motivation up.