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Episode 22: Do We Really Need 10,000 Steps a Day?
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Welcome to Episode 22 of the Movement Logic Podcast! In this episode, Laurel and Sarah ask where the 10,000 step benchmark came from (you might be super surprised!), and if every person needs the same number of steps to receive the same amount of health benefits. We also discuss:
- What are the parameters that change your number of steps
- How do you “get your steps in” without becoming totally obsessed about it
- How where you live might determine how much you walk (versus take the car)
- How the pandemic changed a lot of people’s overall fitness and activity levels
- Whether it’s more valuable to track your general activity level vs number of steps
- How it’s useful to focus less on how many is enough to how many is too few
- How a workout doesn’t cancel out the negative effects of a day of sitting
- In what ways do strength training and cardiovascular exercise support each other
- How to get more movement into your day overall
Reference links:
Step Trackers available to purchase
Daily Steps and All-Cause Mortality: A Meta Analysis of 15 International Cohorts
Daily Step Counts for Measuring Physical Activity Exposure and Its Relation to Health
Guardian Article by David Cox
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Transcript
Inception of Movement Logic
00:00:02
Speaker
Hey everybody, Sarah here. Back in 2017, when Laurel and I started Movement Logic, we felt that movement teachers were being shortchanged by the available continuing education options out there, and we wanted to fill that gap.
New Hip Tutorial Announcement
00:00:15
Speaker
Now here we are five years later, and I'm very proud of the tutorials we've created so far.
00:00:20
Speaker
What's really exciting is, together with Jaisal Parikh, we're launching a brand new hip and SI joint tutorial. In the movement world, the hips and the SI joint get a ton of attention. But at the same time, we see loads of injuries and misinformation all over the place. So what's going on? Clearly, there's some sort of disconnect and an information gap happening.
Sarah's Hip Surgery Experience
00:00:41
Speaker
As some of you might know, I have had several hip surgeries, including a hip replacement about 10 years ago. I don't blame my yoga practice for it because there's a meaningful genetic aspect, but I certainly don't think that my years of deep hip openers particularly helped, in large part because the way I practiced leaned into my hypermobility instead of working on the stability and longevity that my body really needed.
00:01:05
Speaker
There's a lot of unlearning for a lot of us to do around things like hypermobility, SI joint pain, sciatica, yoga butt, and other hip-related concerns.
Free Mini-Course on Hip Issues
00:01:15
Speaker
So with that in mind, Laurel, Jason, and I have created a free hips mini-course video series for you, in which we address these topics and more, including gender bias and inclusivity, whether we store emotions in our hips, and why demonizing the SI joint is not particularly helpful.
00:01:34
Speaker
Right now, you can sign up for the free mini course, and by doing so, you'll get a discount code for $25 off our full hip and SI joint tutorial. This tutorial is a 4-hour course that includes the anatomy and normal structural variations of the pelvis that can determine how a person might be able to move,
00:01:52
Speaker
how injuries happen, as well as how we experience pain, and of course, a whole lot about how movement can be a solution to specific obstacles like SI joint pain, sciatica, and yoga butt, and tons and tons of exercises for you to try out. If you're interested in learning a more thoughtful approach to movement solutions for yourself and your students, sign up for the mini course and get your $25 discount code for the full tutorial.
00:02:17
Speaker
The link to sign up is in our show notes, or if you follow us on Instagram at movement logic tutorials, the link to sign up is in our bio. And now it's time for today's episode.
Podcast Introduction
00:02:33
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up to date and cutting edge tools, evidence and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:03:06
Speaker
Welcome to episode 22 of the Movement Logic podcast.
Origin of 10,000 Steps Goal
00:03:09
Speaker
I'm Dr. Sarah Court, and I'm here with my co-host, Laurel Beaversworth. And today we are talking about the Valhalla of fitness goals, 10,000 steps. Where did this 10,000 steps idea actually come from? The answer, if you don't know, the answer might surprise you. It sure as heck surprised me. I was like, wow, that's really, really random.
00:03:33
Speaker
With that said, we're also going to investigate the value of step tracking generally and walking for exercise. How many steps do we actually need, right? Is 10,000 really the true number? Does it depend based on our age, our fitness levels, other parameters?
00:03:51
Speaker
And then how to like, quote unquote, get your steps in, which is a phrase I hear all the time. I mean, we'll joke like crossing the room, oh, I'm getting my steps in, you know? So how do you get your steps in without becoming so just completely obsessed with the number or cheating to make the tracker happy? Like I also have friends who will just sit and do this with their arms so that the tracker will ping and be like, you did it, you know? So. Can you verbally describe? Oh, sorry. Yes, I realized I just did on a audio.
00:04:22
Speaker
setting. So what I did was it just waved my arms like I was running while I was sitting down. I just hit the microphone as well. I have a lot of friends who do that to like get to close the circle or whatever thing is on the app
Pandemic's Impact on Walking Habits
00:04:34
Speaker
on the iWatch. I don't I don't have it but I think it's like the circles close or something. My health insurance randomly has this thing where
00:04:42
Speaker
it gives you a number of steps to do per day based on what it's tracking as how many steps you're doing. And then it gives you a dollar if you meet those step requirements up to $100 a year. So I for sure have been up at like, I should have been going to bed, but instead I'm holding my phone. Cause I don't, again, I don't have the Apple watch and I'm like just pacing back and forth in my apartment, trying to get that last hundred steps to get my dollar. Oh my goodness.
00:05:12
Speaker
you know clearly I'm motivated by money but we're going to look at like all this sort of step tracking and how useful walking is as a you know general fitness way to exercise. So as you all know by now Laurel and I are coming at this from different perspectives. I'm a physical therapist. Laurel is a strength coach and a yoga teacher and while we decided on this topic for our conversation we haven't had this conversation before.
00:05:36
Speaker
Neither one of us, I don't think, particularly tracks our steps. I know that I don't really anymore, except for when I'm getting paid to do it. But this is a very popular fitness convention, and we both have some opinions about it that we want to share with you.
00:05:52
Speaker
So let's do what we do, movement logic style, and dive in a little deeper.
Step-Tracking Devices and Global Impact
00:05:57
Speaker
10,000 steps a day has become a benchmark that a lot of people use as a way to stay quote unquote healthy and to make sure they get enough movement into their day. There's recent research that estimates over 500 million people worldwide use a step tracking device, which is kind of wild. It's a lot of people. So Laurel, I have a question for you.
00:06:22
Speaker
Do you know how and when and where this 10,000 steps number originated? Now, she may not remember this, but I accidentally gave Laurel a clue because she asked me to share the research paper that came up with this number, and I had to tell her I couldn't because it's not a number that research came up with.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, because you know what I was going to say is I thought it was a marketing device from Fitbit. That would be my guess. Oh, like Fitbit itself came up with $10,000. Was Fitbit the first tracking device? It was like really super popular.
00:06:58
Speaker
In the digital age, probably yes, but I think there were much more simple things that didn't sync with your phone and things like that prior to this. The answer to that is no, that's not the correct answer. Do you have any other guesses apart from Fitbit came up with it?
00:07:17
Speaker
No, I don't. I can't imagine how you would even test that. But anyway. OK. There's literally no chance that you would come up with this answer on your own. Listeners, I made up two possible sources. And then I have one that is the correct answer. So I'm going to read these three options to Laurel. And you can play along at home. And Laurel is going to guess which one she thinks is the correct answer. OK? Here we go. So is it option A?
00:07:45
Speaker
as part of the promotion for the 1994 film, Forest Gump, in which Tom Hanks memorably runs back and forth across the country for, I think, three years. Nike developed the first ever pedometer that clipped onto a sneaker. It was so successful that it sold out in days. Nike's ad campaign used footage from the film and the tagline, 10,000 steps a day, just do it. Okay, so that's option one. That's option one. Or A, rather. Option A. Option B.
00:08:16
Speaker
In response to growing concerns over the health of everyday Americans, President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the president's challenge in 1968 that aimed to encourage all Americans to quote, make being active part of their everyday lives. Participants would receive awards based on their activity level
00:08:35
Speaker
that they would manually record in a log. One of the awards was for walking at least an hour and a half each day. And when pedometers were later developed, that was translated into 10,000 steps. Okay, so let's see, or C.
00:08:52
Speaker
In response to the popularity of the 1964 Olympics, Japanese company Yamasa created the first ever step tracker called Manpokai, which translates to 10,000 step meter. The marketing slogan, let's walk 10,000 steps a day, was catchy and inspiring and it became a fashionable fitness goal for everyday Japanese people.
00:09:14
Speaker
In addition, since 1,000 is a lucky number in Japanese tradition, this number of 10,000 was seen as auspicious. Okay, so is it A, Forrest Gump and Nike? Is it B, Lyndon B. Johnson and the President's Challenge? Or is it C, the 1964 Olympics?
00:09:32
Speaker
What do you think? Wow. So one of them is like a corporate marketing scheme. The second one is this US government initiative. And the third one is like an international Olympic thing. I'm going to go with A because I feel like the corporations really know how to drill ideas into people's heads. That's an excellent answer. Unfortunately, it is incorrect.
00:10:04
Speaker
I wonder what everybody at home listening guessed, but the correct answer is C. It was this Japanese company that created the first ever step tracker in 1964. So actually this answers your prior answer of like, did Fitbit come up with the first one?
Adapting Movement Habits During the Pandemic
00:10:20
Speaker
No. And they've actually been around since 1964, believe it or not. Wow. Yeah. Even, even before Lyndon B. Johnson's whole thing. Yeah. Yeah.
00:10:28
Speaker
So, wait a second. But my question now is like the 10,000 steps thing. Yes. I didn't hear about it until like the mid 2000s. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry, the mid 2000s, the odds, the mid odds. Yeah. Me neither. And I think part of that is, you know, I think this sort of was a
00:10:50
Speaker
a campaign or a trend that happened in Japan in the 60s and wasn't really absorbed into broader culture. And I got to say, I don't actually know why it suddenly became a thing in the 2000s. That would be a really, really interesting. I feel like it might have been the smartwatches. Like right around the time of the Fitbit is when I started hearing about it. My sister-in-law had a Fitbit and she was always
00:11:17
Speaker
you know, leaving after dinner to go get her walking, which is great, you know, but she wanted to get her steps. Get your steps in. Yeah. So let's talk about the research around this number of 10,000 steps. So this number and and and maybe this has to do maybe this is related to your answer. This number has been adopted by the World Health Organization and HHS the
00:11:39
Speaker
What does that stand for? That's just the American version of the World Health Organization. So they've adopted this number as a goal, but it's not actually based on any factual evidence. A lot of research initially compared doing 10,000 steps with 5,000 steps or 3,000 steps and concluded that 10,000 steps was better for your health.
00:12:02
Speaker
But that doesn't tell us the value of 8,000 or 12,000. So the 10,000 just keeps being reinforced with this idea of the more you exercise, the healthier you are. But there is newer research about the quote unquote right number for a particular person, not just everyone needs 10,000 steps. Are you at all a step tracker or a fit bidder? I don't think you are, but I just need to double check.
00:12:30
Speaker
No, but I do track my sleep. Oh, okay. So I'm a tracker. I just don't track steps. I track sleep or sleep tracker. Oh, and I also track my like deadlift PR. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think I track shit. I just don't track steps. I think it's definitely useful to track shit. Um, yeah. Whether really clearly or just kind of, you know, generally to get a sense of like, Oh, I'm getting stronger or things like that. You know, my, my relationship with step tracking is, is basically non-existent again.
00:13:00
Speaker
The first half of the first one, not half the first, you know, three or four months of the year, I care about it because that's when I'm earning my hundred dollars. Once I've earned my dollar a day for a hundred days, I basically give up on it completely. I don't really care.
00:13:15
Speaker
So, for me, if it's monetized, there's money in the game. Yeah, and external accountability. So, my husband was tracking his steps. We were living in New York City, he was a public school teacher, and he basically just didn't sit down all day, and so he would rack up like 14,000 steps. And then the pandemic hit, and
00:13:37
Speaker
he noticed this really steep drop off in terms of his steps. And that's when I think I started to look back on my history and my phone and go, oh, I've also stopped walking as much.
00:13:51
Speaker
then during the pandemic is when I really started to become a little bit more curious in it. But since then, I really haven't been. I think that now living in Alabama, I walk a lot less. I know that I do. I have a car and it's a lot less walking, but I'm also doing more strength training per week and I'm also
00:14:10
Speaker
adding in some cardio respiratory endurance or running type stuff where I'm probably challenging my heart a lot more than I was pre-pandemic or pandemic, even though we're kind of still in the pandemic.
00:14:27
Speaker
I think that's true for a lot of people. I think for a lot of people, not just their walking, but their general fitness engagement went down over the pandemic. And a lot of people who are suddenly working from home were not leaving the house, especially much. I definitely see that with patients that I'm seeing in the clinic who are coming in and they're like, yeah, for the past two years, I just really haven't exercised as much as I used to, or I used to go to this class, but then the class stopped happening, or things like that.
00:14:54
Speaker
Mm hmm. And I, you know, like you, I live now, not I live now, I live in a place where I have a car. And so I definitely walk a lot less than I did when I lived in New York. I would say that my time spent exercising has gone up since pre pandemic.
Walking as a Recovery Exercise
00:15:10
Speaker
But my time engaging in physical activity
00:15:14
Speaker
has gone down, if that makes sense. In some ways, I'm more sedentary now because I'm now fully running my own business and sitting at a computer quite a bit more. I'm not running around teaching classes at other businesses. But at the same time, I think I've become more serious about my physical
00:15:34
Speaker
health and well-being from the standpoint of really challenging my body from a strength and cardio endurance perspective. So I am exercising more. So it's interesting, the trade-off, and I wonder, this 10,000 steps is more, I think, about physical activity and just moving more, right?
00:15:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's the goal is to get people out of this sort of sedentary lifestyle and to get them up and moving more. And, you know, I also like you now that I again, I keep saying now I've lived here for 13 years, I walk a lot less in in LA than I do pretty much anywhere else. I was in Lisbon a couple of weeks ago. And to be fair, I didn't have a car, but I walked everywhere.
00:16:15
Speaker
And if anyone's been there, it's all hills. So you're going uphill or downhill. I mean, I was like, am I on a, you know, step track or like one of those things called this machine? I can't even remember.
00:16:26
Speaker
Oh, Nordic. Yeah, I wish there was an escalator. That city actually has elevators built into the city for like really steep hills. Nice. Yeah. Anyway, let's get back to the topic at hand. So, you know, I have a general sense around how much strength training or you know, I do strength training, I work out on the reformer.
00:16:47
Speaker
And I hike those are my three main sources of exercise but the hike happens less frequently, you know it's maybe once a week. And I also I mean this is like very niche but I ride a motorcycle and I will ride the motorcycle a couple times a week for a couple of hours and it is not.
00:17:03
Speaker
I was with our friend Trina Altman and she was like a picture you like on a Harley just kind of leaning back. I'm like, Oh no, I am on a sport bike, which means it is, you are controlling the bike with your body the entire time. Like you're using your legs. My inner thighs have never been stronger. And so it's a very physical activity, but a very kind of niche physical activity.
00:17:21
Speaker
But there is value, you know, I'll sort of get a sense over like the past week or something, be like, wow, I really didn't walk around very much last week. And there is a great deal of value of walking for exercise. And I definitely see with my patients when they come in and we're figuring out like what exercise they can do.
00:17:41
Speaker
safely or without pain while we're rehabbing. And I'll be like, look, don't underestimate the value of walking. I know that you were a tennis player or I know that you like to run or whatever. But for now, walking is a really good way to get exercise. And so
00:17:57
Speaker
In research, what it tells us is that there's an inverse relationship between the number of daily steps and cardiovascular disease all cause mortality, mortality, meaning any reason, and type 2 diabetes. So the more steps you take, the likelihood of all of those go down.
Age-Adjusted Walking Goals
00:18:22
Speaker
But it doesn't tell you anything about how fast you're walking. No, but that's coming up. I'm going to talk about that. Oh, OK. It's also it's not linear. It's not like one to one ratio this this relationship. So it's not like, you know, more steps are better, but it's not like if you take 10 more steps, you're 10 times less likely to have one of these diseases or something. There's relevance around. And these are areas that just need to be studied more, whether you're doing all of your walking at once.
00:18:48
Speaker
and then around the cadence, the rate of walking. And I'm going to talk about that in a second. So then the question becomes, what number does someone actually need to get to based on their age, their gender, their health, et cetera? And there's this interesting article in The Guardian, which I'm going to link to in the show notes. Professor Katrina Tudor Locke says, we need to change our focus from how many is enough to how many is too few.
00:19:14
Speaker
and also looking at that rate and speed. So minimal effective dose. Exactly. Exactly. Sorry, this is me smashing my papers around. Okay, so it's broken down by age. So if you're 60 and older,
00:19:29
Speaker
There is that decreased risk of mortality, but only up to between 6,000 and 8,000 steps per day. That's the minimal effect of dose. Exactly. Anything you do over 8,000 is just gravy, but you don't have to hit 10,000 to get that effect.
00:19:46
Speaker
if you are under 60 years old, it's the same relationship. More steps is increased risk of mortality up to between 8,000 and 10,000 a day. So over 60, you want to hit 8,000. Under 60, anything over 8,000 is great.
00:20:10
Speaker
The bottom line is there's not really any significance to this 10,000 number beyond the original source, but there is such a thing as too little walking. None of this is, you know, all of this research is sort of relatively new and it's not comparison, the comparison, comparing? You make up the best words on accident. It's not comparison, the value of walking.
00:20:39
Speaker
compared to something like the value of strength training, because I think they are different in terms of what a lot of the research, most research is really looking at cardiovascular health because they're really concerned about heart disease, general heart health, right? So they're looking at cardiovascular types of exercise and that impact on cardiovascular health.
Strength Training and Cardiovascular Health
00:20:59
Speaker
I haven't seen, which doesn't mean there isn't any, but I haven't seen as much research on strength training and cardiovascular health.
00:21:06
Speaker
I think that would be a really interesting thing to study. Well, strength training, from my understanding, does challenge your cardiovascular system, but not nearly to the extent that aerobic endurance training would. Yes, it's true. But I wonder also then if
00:21:24
Speaker
It would have to be some sort of long form study where they looked at people who are strength training and then how many of them actually developed heart disease and things like that. Right. It wouldn't be this immediate. I don't know. I think it would be interesting to study, but maybe challenging to do. So can I ask a question? Of course. I haven't seen any of this research and I think you're way more research literate than me. So, you know, this is my question that I'm just off the cuff kind of coming up with.
00:21:53
Speaker
When they take these minimum effective dose sort of numbers and they go, okay, if you're under 65, you should be hitting this at a minimum. When you're over 65, you should be hitting this at a minimum. This is for people who potentially haven't done very much in their life leading up to that, because I would imagine that people who have been active their whole life, the minimum effective dose might actually be lower. Wouldn't you say?
00:22:24
Speaker
than the people who haven't done a whole lot. Because they've almost, they've pre-paired their body, they've prepared their body, maybe to be able to handle the negative impact of being more sedentary. Whereas folks who've been sedentary leading up to that point,
00:22:50
Speaker
whatever that point is before 65 or after 65 happened. Also, I want to know for how long were they tracking these people? How long of a time were they actually studying? How long these people were walking this number of steps per day? That's a good question. And I did not write it down in my notes. So I think the studies that I looked at, I'll put it in the show notes, but maybe we can answer that in the show notes as well. But to go back to your first question,
00:23:19
Speaker
Have you heard the phrase use it or lose it? So this is the thing on a sort of, so I want to go micro and macro on a micro scale. What they have found in this is a bit of a bummer is that even if you and I do a strength training workout, that's, you know, a lot of work and it's 45 minutes. If I then spend the rest of my day sitting down, it doesn't,
00:23:47
Speaker
really matter that I did that workout in terms of I believe cardiovascular health or just health generally. On a macro scale, if I've been generally extremely healthy my entire life in terms of the amount of exercise or the amount of sports I played or whatever, yes, that sets you up
00:24:08
Speaker
to be in a really good position because you're not starting from this zero point but when they look they'll do like an MRI of a 70 year old cross like through their thigh for example so that you see the bone in the middle you see the muscle and you see the fat around it and
00:24:24
Speaker
for a 70 there's this really famous picture of like a 70 year old who is a triathlete and it's you know there's the bone and the bone actually looks super healthy unsurprisingly and it's a lot of muscle and a little bit of fat and then they side by side compare it to a 70 year old person who's sedentary and as you would expect the bone is not as strong there's not as much muscle there's more fat infiltration into the muscle tissue so it's not that you
00:24:51
Speaker
I think the numbers are just sort of like you do have to continue to be active in order to continue to stave off concerns around cardiovascular health. I don't think it's like your savings account where you've just banked all of this and then you can coast for the
Myths About Cardio and Strength Gains
00:25:09
Speaker
rest of your life. I think it generally sets you up to be in a much better position if you have because your health is probably better, your habits are already there, they're ingrained.
00:25:18
Speaker
but it's not like you hit 60. And then if you sit down for the next 25, 30, 40 years, it's totally fine. Cause the first part of your life you worked out a ton. Yeah. So what I do know is that we lose cardio respiratory capacity much faster than we, when then we lose strength and muscle. And so a lot of these losses,
00:25:45
Speaker
which in the strength and conditioning field are called detraining, but what we might generally know as deconditioning.
00:25:54
Speaker
happen at different rates depending on the system involved. So for strength training, the strength training's impact on cardio health is, it's there, it's something, but it's just not the way to challenge your cardiovascular system. There's a real kind of ceiling to that, where you're going to hit the ceiling and then you're not going to be able to push it any further than that.
00:26:20
Speaker
because you're never going to reach a high enough VO2 max while you're strength training to improve that. The amount of oxygen your body is able to use as fuel. Oxygen uptake I think is a nice more friendly term to use instead of VO2 max.
00:26:41
Speaker
So the amount of oxygen your muscles are able to use to propel you that your whole system, your whole body, your system of systems is able to use to keep you moving forward while you're running, for example. And the better you get at being able to utilize oxygen, the more your cardiovascular abilities improve.
00:27:04
Speaker
Strength training, you're going to hit a ceiling really quickly on your VO2 max, if that's all you're doing. And so they find that people who do cardio respiratory endurance training and strength training
00:27:15
Speaker
tend to see more benefits in their ability to perform cardiovascularly than they do in their abilities to perform well in their strength endeavors and their strength performance. However, I have heard that people with cardiovascular, cardiovascular, higher levels of cardiovascular endurance who are doing cardiovascular training recover faster in their rest periods while strength training. So that's interesting. Interesting.
00:27:42
Speaker
And completely anecdotally, I have found that my strength training has made my the hiking that I do that is, you know, uphill better. I fatigue much less quickly and I recover much more quickly. And it's not because I'm doing any more hiking than I'm doing. It's it's I can only attribute that to the strength training. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Cardiovascular
00:28:11
Speaker
or cardio respiratory endurance training is indicated, I'm sorry, strength training is indicated for cardio respiratory endurance athletes. What the strength folks unfortunately are often I think erroneously touting on Instagram, the internet is that cardio will wreck your strength gains, which is not true. And my question to those folks is how long do you want to live well? Because if you're actually never challenging,
00:28:42
Speaker
your cardio respiratory system, you're more likely to get heart disease. You're more likely to have vascular disease.
00:28:51
Speaker
Do you want to have huge ripped muscles now and then have heart problems later? Or do you want to actually be able to do all of this for longer and maybe recover between your sets faster too, right? Do you happen to know where that idea came from? Because I've never actually heard that. Unfortunately, it's kind of baked into
00:29:16
Speaker
the literature. So the textbook, the NSCA textbook, the essentials of strength and conditioning talk about combination training. So combination training is when you combine cardio respiratory endurance training with anaerobic training or strength training, for example, is a form of anaerobic training. And the idea is that
00:29:42
Speaker
it only works in one direction. Kind of what's communicated is that it's best for cardio respiratory endurance athletes or cardio endurance athletes to do strength training because the strength training supports the biomechanical demands of running, for example. You're maybe less likely to suffer the types of injuries that runners suffer if you have stiffer tendons, if you have stronger muscles.
00:30:08
Speaker
maybe stronger bones, right? Honestly. And that all makes sense. Then they find the opposite is true. Now, keep in mind, this is a textbook written for athletes. And there's really no distinguishment made between like our high school or
00:30:29
Speaker
recreational athletes and our Olympic athletes. It's just for all athletes. The idea is that if you don't want to hurt your performance as say an Olympic weightlifter, which is a high velocity strength, basically a performance of high velocity strength, you shouldn't do cardio endurance training, certainly not before
00:30:55
Speaker
you do your high velocity strength training. And kind of what's communicated is that it's just not valuable, really, for your performance in that particular sport. And then we could extrapolate that out to other types of strength performance athletes. That doesn't include our soccer players and our basketball players and our volleyball players. Those are athletes that actually need both aerobic and anaerobic capacity.
00:31:21
Speaker
And in sometimes in equal measures, actually, depending. So soccer would be a little bit more aerobic. And I would say like volleyball and basketball will be a little bit more anaerobic, especially volleyball. Anaerobic meaning your body's not using oxygen to create energy. It's creating energy much quicker. And so this is more explosive, max effort, single event type.
00:31:43
Speaker
like jumping up and hitting a ball, jumping up and blocking a ball. This is where heavy strength training and high velocity strength training is probably gonna make a bigger impact on the performance for that athlete. Whereas soccer, you're running the length of an entire soccer field, your heart better be in really good shape for that kind of a thing. The idea espoused in the textbook is that for strength athletes, so think Olympic weight lifters, power lifters, things like that,
00:32:11
Speaker
cardio respiratory endurance training will make no positive impact on your performance. So this is where this perspective on athletic training I think becomes really myopic and potentially damaging because ultimately if we're training some high school athlete or recreational athlete
00:32:35
Speaker
Performance in their sport is such a small part of what we're actually preparing them for in their life. And even if we're talking about high performing athletes, aren't we also potentially trying to facilitate health?
00:32:50
Speaker
and longevity for the whole person all of the time. It's just really, I think, damaging in myopic to go, cardio doesn't matter. You don't need to run. Just lift weights. It's not true. You need to be challenging your heart. And strength training isn't going to do it. You're going to hit a ceiling, and you should probably be doing a little
CDC Exercise Guidelines
00:33:12
Speaker
bit more than that. The CDC, the Centers for Disease Control episode,
00:33:17
Speaker
whatever. We talked about how much should you exercise. I can't remember what episode it was. Probably around 10 or 11. Yeah. Um, recommends two times a week strength training, but then is it like 45 between 45 and 150 minutes of cardio respiratory endurance? And if it's 45 minutes, it's intense. So you can't have a conversation. And if it's 150 minutes, which is
00:33:38
Speaker
which is quite a bit longer, it can be less intense, but you actually have to do much more of it, right? I think it's a bit more of that moderate, not 45 and 150. I don't remember. I think it's maybe 75 and 150. So it's like, yeah, the harder it is, the less you have to do, the easier it is, the more you have to do. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that's the case for the relationship between intensity and volume, right? The more intense you're working, the less duration, the less reps you're going to be able to do of that thing.
00:34:06
Speaker
You're going to see very different adaptations from intensity and low, high intensity and low intensity training. But for the most part, what the CDC is concerned with is just this general picture of how often are you challenging your systems and how hard and how hard I think it's interesting that I mean, it sounds so there's definitely there's a difference between.
00:34:28
Speaker
The concept and it is myopic for sure there's a bit of a difference between the concept of you don't need to do any cardiovascular exercise in order to improve your performance at your strength sport versus
00:34:45
Speaker
doing cardiovascular exercise is going to decrease how well you do your strength sport. And I'm wondering about that second idea and if that's something that just in the game of telephone of passing along information and the way that ideas get kind of absorbed and then like spat out in a slightly different meaning where that came from and if that's
00:35:09
Speaker
you know, if that's how if people are dismissing cardio because they're like, it's not going to make my PR any better versus are they dismissing cardio because they think it's actually going to hurt their PR. Well, here's I can tell you what the literature says. So please in the textbook, it does not recommend doing cardio respiratory endurance training before the day of right, right before doing your anaerobic training, your strength training, or maybe it's a plyometric training.
00:35:37
Speaker
or your velocity-based strength training, your Olympic lifts or your kettlebell swings or whatever, do those first and then do your cardio-respiratory training. That's if you are prioritizing your strength, right?
00:35:52
Speaker
It's also kind of common sense, which what this means is that when you're lifting heavy weights, the stakes are a little higher, form matters more. And so you don't want to exhaust yourself on the treadmill or exhaust yourself running around outside and then come and do these higher stakes movements when you've already kind of depleted your energy. You've already spent your energy capital on running and you're poorer in terms of energy. And now you're starting from this less rich energy, rich place.
00:36:22
Speaker
The other thing about fitness in general, whether it's strength or cardio respiratory fitness, is that we're always balancing fitness and fatigue.
Balancing Fitness Priorities
00:36:35
Speaker
So on one side, we've got fitness and we're trying to get fitness, but while we're trying to get fitness, we're accumulating fatigue. And this fatigue can last for a couple of seconds. It can last for a couple of minutes. There are different mechanisms for fatigue and different types of fatigue. It can also last for, last for several days.
00:36:52
Speaker
So if you do a long, hard run on Tuesday and then you go to strength train on Wednesday, you're probably going to see a decrease in your performance on Wednesday because you've accumulated so much fatigue on Tuesday from your run. This is something we're always balancing, though. And so if your priority is on strength and strength performance, then what you would do is you would strategize when you're doing your cardiorespiratory training.
00:37:19
Speaker
so that it is deprioritized and you're not taking away from, in other words, you're not allowing it to bring you to this very fatigued state before you are going to perform your strength training exercises.
00:37:33
Speaker
you would perform your strength training exercises and then you would be less energy rich, more fatigued in your cardio-respiratory endurance training. Now, what if you're a cardio-respiratory endurance athlete or you're prioritizing, you know, your performance in running. You want to be able to run fast, you want to be able to run longer, you want to be able to do races or whatever your goal is. You wouldn't necessarily start with your run and then do your strength training even there, right? But what you might do is you might
00:38:04
Speaker
take a whole day to just work on running and give yourself the rest of the day to recover and then do your strength training the next day from maybe not a fully rested and unfettered state, but you would allow yourself to be most energy rich and most prepared for your runs because that's really where you want to shine. That's where you want to be able to give it your all so that you can improve your performance.
00:38:34
Speaker
It's a balancing act. It's always a balancing act. We're always balancing fitness and fatigue. And it seems like it also really depends on what your exercise fitness movement priorities are. And then as a result of that, what are you going to prioritize versus deprioritize? But I don't think there's really anyone out there except for maybe, you know, performance level athletes who
00:39:03
Speaker
you know, for whatever reason, you know, Olympic weightlifters, for example, who should, I mean, they probably shouldn't anyway, but only do one or the other, let's say, like, if you're a long distance runner, that doesn't mean you should never strength train. If you're a power lifter, doesn't mean you should never go for a walk or a run. And for the rest of us, ordinary human beings,
00:39:24
Speaker
uh you know it again it there are these parameters being set around number of steps a day that are age-based there's also i think we can all sort of have a sense in ourselves of how how fit do i feel right now and it's a kind of a nebulous term but for me at least what it is is is you know not it's not a day to day it's a sort of weeks or a month
00:39:48
Speaker
feeling. And I can tell in the chunks of time where I haven't done as much of any kind of exercise, let's say, if I've been like super busy with work, or I don't know, I feel less, you know, quote unquote fit in my body, I can tell, like, I don't feel as strong, I don't feel as energized, I feel more sluggish, it impacts my mood in a huge way, you know. So I think for the rest of us ordinary people,
00:40:14
Speaker
getting a sense of what is the amount where in my life I now feel like I can live it in a way that I feel really good and optimal and how much on a weekly or monthly basis does that mean I need to do
00:40:32
Speaker
of exercise of any kind and then getting even more nitty gritty, which kind makes me feel what? And I think for us regular people, it's a really good thing to start to try to track and get a sense of.
00:40:49
Speaker
And it's always hard to, you know, if you've if you've had a few weeks, I mean, it's true for everybody. If you've had a few weeks where you haven't moved as much, it becomes increasingly harder to motivate to start up again.
Walking to Improve Mood and Energy
00:41:01
Speaker
And that is where to bring it on back to walking. That's where I think walking is actually a really great sort of bridge in a way, because, you know, if you if you haven't done your strength training for a while, you're like,
00:41:14
Speaker
some weights it's gonna be so heavy or like if you haven't gone for a run you're like oh god the first mile is just it's gonna suck so long or
00:41:23
Speaker
You know, if you just if you've had a day where you're like, oh, God, I've been sitting all day and I don't know, I'm just going to go home and sit in front of the TV. You know, that's where a 20 minute walk can actually start to really change things and get your body some of that endorphin again and get you back into this feel like habit and feeling of wanting to move. Right. Because it's sort of self-repelling, but you have to give it a push in the beginning to get it going. It's like those cars.
00:41:49
Speaker
those toy cars where you have to drag them backwards first, and then you let them go and they go flying across the room, right? Like that first part, that first part of like, you kind of have to do the work yourself. And then the impetus for it and the habit kind of tends to take off a little bit from there.
00:42:05
Speaker
So I have another question for you. What are some ways to get more walking into your life without being hyper focused on this number or getting your steps in or things like that? Do you Laurel have any habits that you try to use or that you suggest to people that emphasize
00:42:26
Speaker
just kind of that, that getting up and moving around separate from these are the times that I'm sharing, I'm saving for exercising, working out. I don't necessarily like, for example, I'm not super like Katie Bowman type person where remove all the furniture from my living room so that I have to sit on the floor or like park three miles.
00:42:52
Speaker
before I get to the grocery store so that I have to walk the three miles to the grocery store and load up my backpacking backpack with my groceries and then hike the remaining three miles back. But I think those are cool things too and they're really clever ways of really combining the work that you need to do in your life or even the relaxation that you're going to do in your life with
00:43:17
Speaker
more physical activity slash just more movement, right? So for me, what I do is I allow my mental health and that feeling state that you described of like, how fit do I feel? Mine often is how satisfied and happy or maybe happy is like the wrong word, like just how positive or how good maybe do I feel right now?
00:43:46
Speaker
If the answer is not great, then my next question is, how long have I been sitting at this computer? When's the last time I went outside? And that's my indication to stop.
00:44:01
Speaker
grab some water, get some little energy in my body, and let's just go for a walk. And the walk could be around the block and take me 10 minutes, or the walk could be all the way along the trails of this land preserver I live next to and be an hour and a half, or anywhere in between, depending on how much time I have. I really allow
00:44:22
Speaker
my mental health to sort of spur me to get outside. That's big. And then usually when I'm outside and I'm not doing putzing around the yard or whatever, I'm walking. And walking for me is really, really beneficial for just my mental health. Yeah, absolutely.
00:44:41
Speaker
And I think if someone has a schedule like you and I do where it's not, I go to a place and I stay there all day and then I leave the place and come home, we're fortunate in that we have the ability to say, you know what, I'm going to put down this project I'm working on right now and I'm going to go outside for 20 minutes and
Movement Tips for Desk Jobs
00:44:58
Speaker
walk around.
00:44:58
Speaker
for my patients or my clients that I see who have desk jobs. And I think more and more corporate culture is understanding that forcing their employees to sit at a desk without moving all day is detrimental. And so I think there's generally more of a sense of
00:45:16
Speaker
It's OK if you see someone getting up and stretching at their desk. It's not weird. I think more and more people are doing stuff like that. But what I tell people who have a desk job or a job where you're just facing a computer all day long is you set a timer. And if it's possible, get up every 40 minutes, hour, whatever time block is reasonable based on the way that your tasks are set out during your day. And so that's even just like,
00:45:44
Speaker
get up, move around, stretch, maybe take a lap around the office or something like that. I tell people if you're on a conference call and you are not, if you're just listening, because there's so many of these where it's like, everyone call in and just listen. If you're just listening to a conference call, put it on speaker, mute yourself. And if you can, just take it on your phone and go for a walk. If that's not an option, get up from your desk, move around, stretch. Again, maybe take it on your phone and just walk around the office.
00:46:13
Speaker
And this is not steps. Well, it is steps, technically. It's going upwards. Take the stairs. Take the stairs is the easiest, quickest way, I think, if you live in a world where you have to use an elevator or there's a lot of steps that you can really get at it. I mean, this is something I do when I travel, when I fly, and then you get off the plane. And even if you got up and moved around a bit, you still a bit, it's still pretty brutal.
00:46:41
Speaker
And everyone's like, oh, customs or whatever. And, you know, there's a moving walkway. And I'm either barreling down the moving walkway, like literally knocking people over like bowling pins, not really, but like with my voice at a time. Or if there's an escalator, I'm using the stairs or, you know, things like that, like I'm forcing more movement into my body in airports, like, for example.
Increase Daily Physical Activity
00:47:05
Speaker
I think it's I think one of the things that we can all do is just kind of look at our surroundings, look at the
00:47:11
Speaker
the things that we interact with on a daily basis, and how can I make that more, you know, exercise-y, for want of a better word. Can I add something? Sure. Related to this? So, one of my dear friends posted in her stories about whether she should get this really fancy percussive massage machine, or it maybe was like a really fancy neck massage contraption.
00:47:37
Speaker
And my knee-jerk reaction was, no! And then she was like, wait, why? And I was like, oh, you know, I actually have to be thoughtful about, like, why? And I thought about it, and I was like, well, one, this might be overpriced. It looks like it feels great. It's just this contraption that just massages your neck, and you basically don't have to do anything, and you just go, ugh. You massage your neck. Sounds great.
00:48:01
Speaker
And I know that my friend has therapy balls and she loves to do self-massage. And I was like, well, you have the therapy balls, which cost a fraction likely of what this costs. And I think half the benefit, maybe even more than half the benefit of the therapy balls, is they actually force you to get up
00:48:22
Speaker
and get down on the ground and roll around or stand against a wall and squirm around. And like sometimes even like bring your body into kind of awkward positions as you're like trying to you know work on your quad or whatever. I feel like that might be the majority of the benefit of them is that they because they're so basic and so effective and so affordable too.
00:48:45
Speaker
You know, these are really positive traits and they actually get you up and moving in addition to the ball getting your tissues moving, right? And it feels good and all the good benefits of that. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's true. And while you were saying that, I was like, oh, we should do an episode where we just compare various massage tools and the pros and cons.
00:49:10
Speaker
I think that would be interesting. Yeah, I do. I would listen to that episode. Okay. All right.
00:49:16
Speaker
You know, that's, that's sort of a, that's it from me at least, you know, the, the sum up of, you know, do I have to do 10,000 steps is the, the shorter answer is no. The longer answer is if you're over 60, then this is just from the research. If you're over 60, you want to get to at least 6,000. If you're under 60, you want to get to at 8,000 more than that is gravy. Less than that is not nothing, but it's not doing as much. And also like, if you have a week where you don't walk as much, it's you'll be fine.
00:49:46
Speaker
you know like I think sometimes we get so hard on ourselves and that's where people get like you know they have this thing to track as an accountability tool but then they also become like a slave to the accountability tool where they're like well I can't I can't sit here and talk to you because I have to go take my walk and get in my last thousand steps right so we always want to make it my feeling is
00:50:05
Speaker
We always want to make sure that our exercise goals, our fitness goals are making our life better. Meaning also like we can be more present because we feel better, because we're in a good mood, because we were able to do our exercise, but I'm not going to, you know, be hard on myself if I had a week where I didn't do as much as I wanted to, right? It's just we got to we got to account for life.
00:50:28
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Can I can I ask? I want to add something that I wanted to add before, but I didn't. And it's kind of going back to something that we were talking about quite a bit earlier. And then I also want to ask for just a little clarification of something you said.
00:50:45
Speaker
So, the first thing I want to say is when we're comparing the detraining, the speed of detraining or the speed of deconditioning that happens between the cardio-respiratory system and the muscular system, with regards to how we might lose cardio-respiratory endurance faster than we would lose, say, strength or muscle, we should do a whole episode on detraining and whatnot with strength, or maybe I'll do a solo episode on it.
00:51:16
Speaker
Again, bone is a very different tissue than muscle or protein. Bone is muscle protein. It's a very different tissue in the sense that it's during the growth phase of bone that we have the most potential
00:51:36
Speaker
to improve our bone size, which is potentially the biggest factor with regards to bone strength. And so this happens around puberty before our bones stop growing. And so I just wanted to say that when we're talking about how much we need to do in order to not backslide,
00:52:01
Speaker
and enter a deconditioned state, it really depends on the system that we're challenging. Bone strength later, after bone growth stops, right after the bones stop getting actually bigger in diameter or longer in length, is largely, I think, dependent on bone density and the laying down of collagen. And so that's something that we
00:52:25
Speaker
get from strength training. It's something we potentially get from impact training as well. And what I think we're largely trying to do as we especially approach older age is prevent bone loss. Right. And so that can happen while we're trying to prevent muscle as well. And depending on the type of impact training, it can also be kind of coupled with a more cardio endurance, cardio respiratory.
00:52:49
Speaker
stimulus as well. But I guess when we talk about like how fast we're going to lose something, we should really get a little maybe a little bit more specific about what we're trying to maintain. So in this episode, we're talking about just physical activity, just being more physically active, walking being a very low intensity physical activity that we could just simply probably most of us be doing more of.
00:53:13
Speaker
But if we're talking about bone strength and we're talking about strength, walking probably isn't going to be the way that we increase those capacities and the way we prevent detraining or deconditioning of those particular capacities. I just wanted to kind of go back to that. Absolutely. And no, no, no, is it not likely? It's just not.
00:53:32
Speaker
It's just it's not going to it. And I talked to a lot of my older patients who they're like, yeah, I love to go on walks. And I go to yoga. And I'm like, we need to you need to start lifting heavy things. You know, you absolutely need to. It's not a question of maybe.
00:53:48
Speaker
Yeah. Awesome. The other question I have for you is you said something along the lines of if you do your strength training workout, but then you do nothing for the rest of the day, it's almost as if the strength training workout never happened. Is that true? Well, okay. But that is speaking.
00:54:09
Speaker
Wait a second. I need to look, you know, I'm sort of, I'm quoting in a very generalized way, but there is research around, it's not like it didn't happen in terms of like your bone density and your strength, but it's not erasing the detrimental factor of when I sat down for nine hours. Sitting down for nine hours is still detrimental. It's not made, it's not erased. Sorry. I'm so glad that I asked for clarification because yes, that makes total sense.
00:54:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:41
Speaker
All right, everybody.
Podcast Engagement and Additional Content
00:54:42
Speaker
Well, a note to you. You can check out our show notes for links to references that we mentioned in this podcast. You can visit the MovementLogic website where you can get on our mailing list to be in the know about sales on our tutorials. You can watch the video version of this episode if you want to see what our faces look like while we think out loud and what our recording spaces look like. I recently got a reformer in my office here at home, which I'm very excited about. But it means the Tetris that is going on in this room that
00:55:10
Speaker
you can't see, but I am looking at has gone up a level. Like everyone Tetris was like, Oh, now I'm on a hard, Oh God, they're coming faster. And you know, it's quite manic in here. Thank you so much for joining us on the movement logic podcast. Finally, it helps us if it helps us so much. If you liked this episode or any of our episodes to subscribe.
00:55:32
Speaker
and rate and review on Apple podcasts, on Stitcher, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. If you have a question that you'd like us to discuss, one of the easiest ways to get it to us is pop it in that review that you're going to write about how much you liked this episode because we read them and it makes our little hearts just a little bit bigger to know that you are also enjoying the podcast. Review, write a review.
00:56:00
Speaker
Thank you all so much and we'll see you next time.