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NEAT
Today’s email is on NEAT which stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. This basically means incidental movement during the day such as walking.
What I have found over the years with my personal training clients is those who are office workers, driving for most of the day or are in meetings for large portions of the day, your average daily steps will be low unless you make a concerted effort to track your daily steps. Especially if you are driving from door to door or you catch public transport within close proximity to your house and get off close to work. It’s also common now for people to eat lunch at their desk and go straight back to work.
I recall during my corporate career I could easy walk 20 metes from my desk to the lift straight down to the work cafeteria, sit down, eat lunch and then get the lift straight back up to my desk.
Those who have a low daily step count increase their risk of abnormal blood glucose, insulin and type 2 diabetes even when you are completing vigorous exercise.
Studies have shown that increasing your daily steps increases your insulin sensitivity and reduces your BMI.
Walking is also a simple and painless way of burning calories. Walking 10,000 steps will burn approximately 500 calories which is a sufficient amount of calories when you are in a calorie deficit.
I recommend tracking your steps and gradually increasing your daily steps by 500 each day every week. For example week 1 10,000, week 2 10,500 etc. When you reach 13 or 14,000 then go back to 10,000 and start again.
Walking 10,000 steps is usually around 6-7km. This is approximately 60 minutes or so of walking. This doesn’t have to be completed at once. You can break the walk down into 20 minutes before work, 20 minutes at lunch time and 20 after work and then above that is a bonus.
The most effective way is to use a fit-bit or wearable device such as an Apple watch or Garmin watch that will track steps during the day.
The next blog post will be on training volume which you can view here.
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