Start Setting Step Goals for Walking

by Pedometer Enthusiast on April 4, 2011

Chances are, you walk everyday. You may go for a morning walk every day, or you might only walk a little bit around the office or to classes. So you’re already walking and now you want to do better and make some improvements? It’s time to start setting some goals, right? Yes! But maybe not exactly the goals that come to mind. There are a couple “steps” to get started. The first thing you’ll want to do isn’t going to include a goal for number of steps just yet. First, you’ll want to find out how much you currently walk. That way you’ll know if improvements are made and you’ll set better goals.

Find your step baseline

Your baseline is simply a record of how much you walk each day over a given period of time (typically one week). The easiest way to find your step baseline is to use a pedometer to count your steps each day (it’s very tedious to count your own steps!). If your pedometer doesn’t store information for any past days, you’ll need to write down step data at the end of each day. Just walk around as your normally would throughout the week. At the end of the week, you should have a record of the number of steps you took for each day of the week. This constitutes your baseline. If you like visual representations of data, you can plot it on a graph or, if your pedometer has computer software, you should be able to download it and let the computer graph it for you. There are even some handy (and free!) online services to help you if you know where to look. Graphing it isn’t necessary, but if it helps you then you should do it.

Set your step benchmark

Your benchmark is typically the highest amount you had during the week.  So, if you walked 2400 steps on Tuesday, and that was the highest number of steps for any day, you can use that as your benchmark. Your benchmark will become your goal for the next week. Use that as your goal each day.  Simply put, the benchmark is the highest point of your baseline, which then becomes your daily goal for the next week.

Or

If your prefer, you can average the amount you walked each day of the week and use the average as your benchmark. Here’s an example:

During the test week, you carried your shiny new pedometer with you and got these numbers of steps: 6200, 6500, 5750, 5500, 6550, 5900, and 5700.

Now bust out your calculator (your pedometer probably doesn’t have one) and do the math to see your average number of steps per day, in this scenario: 6200+6500+5750+5500+6550+5900+5700=42,100
42,100/7=6014

So, your benchmark in this example would be 6014 steps. You might want to just round it off to 6000 for simplicity. That’s your choice.

Get Walking with Your Pedometer!

It doesn’t matter which way you do it, it’s just a good idea to know where you’re starting from. You probably won’t be able to do 10K a day right away. Have a good starting point, it’s much easier to set goals. Write down your goal somewhe

re you’ll see it every day. Go for small steady improvements. You’ll want any positive change you make to be a habit. Now you know how much you already walk, and you have your first goal! Now get out there and go walking!

Photo courtesy of angietorres

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New Week, New Goals

by Pedometer Enthusiast on April 3, 2011

Setting goals is easy, keeping goals is hard. Most people have goals set for the new year. Everything is clean, fresh, and it’s mentally easier to make a change then. But nothing is really different but a calendar. A piece of paper is telling us, “Hey, now’s a good time to drop those bad habits and pick up better ones!”. My approach? If something needs to be changed then change it right away. Waiting for the new year is unnecessary.

There’s a slight mental advantage on has when goals are set at the beginning of the new year. Typical goals are absolute: “I will never smoke again”,  ”I will go to the gym everyday”, or “I will meditate daily”. The problem with these goals is if you mess up once then you clean slate, and your mental advantage vanish. And you’re right where you were last year.

When you start out with a walking goal (or exercising, eating right, reading a book, quitting smoking, finishing a project, etc.) it can be helpful to set weekly goals instead of daily ones. Of course, your mind will break up your weekly 70,000 step goal (for an easy math example) into 10,000 steps a day BUT you’ll also get extra credit when you go the extra mile (literally!).

Having a new goal at the beginning of the next week will give you the liberty to adjust it, up or down, without the negative repercussions of spoiling your clean slate. Every week is a new clean slate and every week you can prove to yourself that you can accomplish your well thought out walking goal!

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