Walking Still Counts

The Exercise You Didn’t Schedule

Walking has one enormous advantage over most forms of exercise.

You can accidentally do it.

You don’t need to book anything. You don’t need to wait for a machine. Nobody needs to dim the lights and turn the music up.

Sometimes you simply realise the next bus is twelve minutes away and Clapham Common is fifteen minutes on foot.

So you walk.

Sometimes London makes the decision for you.

The Tube is delayed. The weather is unexpectedly good. You get off one stop early because sitting still suddenly seems less appealing than moving.

None of this looks particularly impressive online.

That may be part of its charm.

Does Walking Count as Exercise?

Walking is physical activity. This isn’t controversial.

UK Chief Medical Officers’ guidance counts brisk walking as moderate-intensity activity that can contribute towards the recommended 150 minutes a week for adults.

Walking counts. It doesn’t need a rebrand to qualify.

Fitness culture occasionally behaves otherwise.

There is a peculiar hierarchy to movement now.

The reformer class counts.

The strength session counts.

The run definitely counts, particularly if there is a screenshot afterwards.

Walking to Brixton because the traffic is dreadful somehow feels like it needs defending.

It doesn’t.

A walk across London doesn’t become exercise only when your watch notices.

The Clothes Are Not the Point

Activewear has become very good.

This is obviously not a complaint.

A beautifully cut black legging, a fitted jacket and a trainer you would happily wear after the workout are all perfectly welcome here.

But changing into activewear doesn’t confer official status on movement.

You can walk in tailoring.

You can take the stairs in loafers.

You can cross half of South London wearing the coat you were already wearing because the point was to get somewhere, not to prove anything.

Sometimes exercise fits around the day.

Sometimes the day is the exercise.

That distinction may be less important than we have made it.

No, Walking Isn’t Everything

This is usually the point where somebody decides walking is either completely transformative or completely insufficient.

It is neither.

Walking is excellent everyday movement.

It also isn’t the same thing as loading the body, building strength or asking muscles to do something progressively harder over time.

Both can matter.

The same UK guidance that counts brisk walking towards weekly activity also recommends muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days a week. That feels like a rather sensible arrangement: move often, and occasionally ask the body to do something harder.

You don’t have to choose between being someone who trains and someone who walks.

Walk.

Lift things.

Stretch occasionally if your body is asking for it.

Do whatever form of movement you actually enjoy enough to repeat.

The hierarchy is mostly invented.

Do You Really Need 10,000 Steps?

Wellbeing has a habit of taking perfectly ordinary things and turning them into projects.

Sleep becomes optimisation.

Food becomes a protocol.

Walking becomes a step target.

Then the target becomes another thing you can fail.

Ten thousand steps is perhaps the most successful example. It is a beautifully neat number, which is probably one reason it became so culturally sticky.

The evidence is less tidy.

A 2022 meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts found that the association between more daily steps and lower all-cause mortality appeared to level off at roughly 6,000–8,000 steps a day in adults aged 60 and over, and around 8,000–10,000 in younger adults. It was observational research, so it doesn’t turn those numbers into prescriptions.

It does make one thing rather clear.

A day doesn’t become worthless at 9,462.

Bodies aren’t loyalty cards.

There are days when you might walk across London without thinking about it. There are others when the day is desk, car, meeting, rain, home.

This is life.

Consistency matters more than turning every Tuesday into an assessment.

It is the same argument The Weekend, Reconsidered made about free time: not everything good for you needs to be optimised.

London Helps

There are cities where walking requires intention.

London often requires resignation.

The quickest route is unexpectedly on foot. A station exit is somewhere entirely different from where you assumed. The bus has disappeared from the board. There is another set of stairs.

You walk because you are already there.

And then, occasionally, something happens that a treadmill is very bad at reproducing.

You notice things.

A new place on Atlantic Road. Someone wearing an excellent coat. The first genuinely cold morning of autumn. A street you’ve crossed fifty times looking completely different because the light changed.

Movement becomes part of living rather than something temporarily separated from it.

That might be the bit worth protecting.

Sleep Shows was about the night. This is the rest of the day.

Koda’s Edit

Keep the classes you love.

Keep the strength work.

Keep the trainer that somehow makes you want to leave the house.

But stop treating the movement between those things as though it doesn’t count.

Walk to the coffee.

Take the longer way home when you have the time.

Get off the bus because London has stopped moving and you haven’t.

Carry your own shopping.

Choose the stairs sometimes.

None of it needs a name.

There is something faintly ridiculous about taking a taxi to the gym to walk on a treadmill.

Sometimes the most useful movement is the kind that never became a workout in the first place.

And if the morning is where you want to start, that’s Before the Day Gets Loud.

It still counts.

Further Reading

UK Chief Medical Officers’ Physical Activity Guidelines — Department of Health and Social Care, 2019. Recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week, including brisk walking, alongside muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days.

Paluch AE et al. — “Daily steps and all-cause mortality: a meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts.” The Lancet Public Health, 2022;7(3):e219–e228.