If you work full time in an office and drive to work, how on earth do you get to 10k steps per day?

[Bluesheep8]

I've just installed an app on my phone that tracks my steps. I have to drive to work and am desk based. I get half an hour for lunch. How do you do it?

I park 1.5 miles from work for free parking some days - 10k before I do anything else. However mostly motivated by being tight and not wanting to pay for parking or bus.

I don’t. I run 20 ish miles a week which keeps my weekly average up.

In summer I was parking a bit further away from the office, but the path is unlit and I don’t really like it in the dark.

I was thinking of starting a lunch time walking group at work to do 30 minutes every day. But it suddenly got really cold and the only person who was vaguely interested in joining in has been off sick.

Walk the dog or hit the gym after work, no chance otherwise.

I get to work early enough to go for a walk before I start, another at lunch and finish off with a short stroll in the evening if im still a few steps short

I work in a nursery (baby room) and do around 15,000 a day. Just incase anyone thinks we just ‘sit cuddling babies all day’

I really struggle with this too, I drop kids off on way to Office then mad dash to desk. No break until time to go home at 5.30 ish then mad dash to get kids again and feed them, bed routine etc.

I never have. Most office based people don't, do they?

Just as a heads up OP, it's evident from other threads that some devices the count steps hugely over estimate. If you search for other threads there's plenty of people who think they have 2,000 steps from waking up going to the kitchen and making breakfast. So claim they don't even have to try and get 6,000 just pottering around the house. I kid you not - one thread really stuck in my memory as it was all quite mad!!

Important thing to note is the 10,000 steps thing is arbitrary. Though obviously it's beneficial to you to walk more - what you need is a fast walk for at 30 or so minutes. Certainly needs to be more than a 'potter'. A walk after work is certainly the way to go.

Thanks for your experiences and advice everyone. I plan to walk as fast as I can on my lunchtime walk as a fast pace obviously means more steps. Only started tracking this on Monday and by focusing on it, I did 1k more steps yesterday so aiming to increase each day.

I find that the biggest obstacles for achieving this - for me - are location, occupation, sweating, and migraines.

I run very hot (menopausal) so even 20 mins worthwhile exercise will make sweat pour from my scalp, leaving my hair damp and frizzy for at least an hour which then needs fixing. I may also get a face flush so I'll look like a tomato to boot, and my face leaks sweat so I can't put make up on for an hour. About 50% of the time exercise triggers a migraine. So doing anything before work means allowing 2 hours, plus migraine risk.

I also don't work in one place - I go to different locations every day. One day it could be 30 miles away, the next it could be 100 miles, so my leaving times vary from 5am to 8.30am. I don't get any lunch break on site and parking is stressful enough when you've never visited the client before, without researching where to park 1.5 miles away and allowing an extra 30 mins (and anyway, see sweaty tomato/migraine issue above).

After work is feasible, although if I'm driving 75 miles, doing a full day on site with clients with no break then driving 75 miles home and getting in at 7pm, I really don't fancy walking anywhere!

I need to do something though.

I don't count my steps but run for an hour to hour and a half before work every morning and walk in my half hour lunch break if the weather's not too bad. Sometimes walk after work too.

I can't. I average 6000 a day most of which are doing housework after work. I don't get s break longer than to eat my
Lunch.

I have to park away from site - takes 8 mins or so to hoof it into my office. Then I just keep getting up, pace about when I brew up, offer to do errands even though we have junior staff for that! Some days I'm very active on site so it's easy to get 10-12k. When I was a teacher I would easily get to 20k steps so it was quite a change to suddenly only manage 5k! Effort must be made.

I can only do it by running/walking before ir after work. I work in a small building, the only parking is right outside the door, the kitchen and toilets are only 100 steps away from my desk.

Rule of thumb is that 1,000 steps takes ten minutes “proper” walking, so if you don’t have steps baked into your commute or job then you’d need to find up to an hour and a half in your day to get up to 10k (assuming that almost everyone gets 1K in dribs and drabs even if their car is parked right next to the door to work). Not a trivial task.

I get five thousand on my public transport commute which takes ten minutes from home to tube and fifteen minutes from tube to desk which means that the remaining five thousand is manageable, but if I didn’t have that it would be a struggle.

Fitbit reckons I got about 5k steps from a 2.7 mile run this morning. Does that sound plausible?

Dog walk before work , sometimes walk at lunchtime and and a run in the evenings averages me on 15-20 k steps in the week and at the weekends I hit nearer 30000.
Having a high energy dog really helps, no chance for rest when you are with him.

I park where I can park for free, which is about a mile from the office. There and back is roughly half my steps.

I find it really hard. In the warmer months I would walk before or after work but it’s hardly tempting when it’s dark, wet and freezing

Rule of thumb is that 1,000 steps takes ten minutes “proper” walking

I think that's on the optimistic side. When you track accurately, with a Garmin or equivalent as opposed to a Fitbit or cheapy step tracker, you'll find 10,000 steps is around 5.5 to 6 miles - dependent on stride length etc.

Even taking that at its highest end - so 6 miles - that would mean 1,000 steps being 2/3 of a mile. That's a very fast walking pace for 10 minutes. A steady-ish pace is usually quoted at 3 miles an hour.

So, at a steady (not slow!) pace you're looking at around 2 hours of walking to reach 10,000 steps - and that's on the generous side of the equation.

If you have the room, and the pennies, buy a treadmill ( I got mine off gumtree cheap as chips ) you can walk in the evening/early morning etc what ever the weather. I use mine at lunchtime while I watch Neighbours and home and away - so an hours walking. If I'm not in target by 7pm I do a bit more in the evening too. Because as time goes by you will probably increase your goal too .

I think my Huawei tracker is pretty accurate tests show them to be pretty good

on a work day when I literally drive to work sit at a desk all day never have time to take lunch or go out at lunchtime drive home pick up the kids get dinner get them to bed at 8 o'clock I'm lucky if I've done 2 1/2 thousand steps no bloody way I'm going out in the dark to try and get more steps in by then

Even on weekends we live in a Rural village so we go everywhere by car Usually average 7-8k then

I dont manage it unless I spend my whole day focussing on how to do it. It's not worth the hassle

I eat lunch at my desk and walk for an hour at lunch, but I walk to and from train stations on my commute which helps!

I walk the dog before and after work for up to an hour. I generally hit 10,000 steps during the evening walk.