How to get more steps on a desk job, without a gym

The easiest way to get more steps on a desk job is to hang short walks on things your day already has: take phone calls on foot, use the far bathroom and the stairs, walk a lap about once an hour, and walk for ten minutes after lunch and again when you finish work. None of these takes long on its own, but together they can add a few thousand steps to a day spent mostly in a chair.

You don't need a gym, a change of clothes or a step target that feels like a second job. You need to know roughly where you are now, and a handful of walks with a fixed place in the day.

How many steps does a desk job give you?

Usually fewer than you would guess. A desk day is made of very short trips: chair to kitchen, chair to bathroom, chair to the meeting room and back. If you work from home, even those get shorter, and it is easy to reach the evening having walked about as far as the front door.

The quickest way to know is to look. If you carry your iPhone, the Health app records your steps without any setup. Search for Steps in it, or look under Activity, and switch to the week or month view. An Apple Watch records them too. Note your usual total on work days and compare it with a weekend.

As for a target, the famous 10,000 is usually traced to a pedometer sold in Japan in the 1960s rather than to research. Studies since then suggest the benefits begin well below it and keep rising with more steps, up to a point. So the useful goal is relative to you. If work days come in at a couple of thousand, adding two or three thousand is a real change, and you can decide later whether you want more. Working from home and barely moving has more on using a step count without letting it run you.

A rough conversion helps with planning. At an ordinary walking pace most adults take somewhere around a hundred steps a minute, so ten minutes on foot is very roughly a thousand steps. Minutes are easier to plan than steps, so the rest of this post thinks in minutes.

Can you walk during calls and meetings?

Often, yes. Calls are the biggest store of steps in most desk jobs, because many of them don't need you to look at anything.

• Phone calls and audio-only calls. Put in earbuds and walk: around the block, around the office floor, up and down a corridor. Warn the other person if the wind is loud.
• One-on-ones in person. Suggest a walking meeting with a colleague you meet often. Walking side by side is often an easier way to talk through a hard problem than sitting across a table.
• Calls where you mostly listen. Weekly updates, all-hands meetings and webinars can often be heard on a walk, with the camera off if the meeting allows it.
• Keep the screen calls seated. If a call needs a shared screen, a document or careful notes, take it at the desk. Walking while squinting at slides helps nobody.

Have a route ready so you don't spend the first minutes of the call deciding where to go. A loop that takes about as long as a typical call, ten or fifteen minutes, works well, and you can go round twice on longer ones. Jot the action items in Notes on your phone as you go, or write them down the moment you are back.

Take the long way to everything

An office, or a home, is full of short walks you can make slightly longer.

• Use the far bathroom, on another floor if there is one, and take the stairs to it.
• Take the stairs for anything up to a few floors, at least in one direction.
• Use a smaller glass. You refill it more often, and every refill is a walk.
• Carry one thing at a time when you clear the desk, put away groceries or tidy up at home.
• Put the printer, the trash can and the charger across the room, not within reach of the chair.
• Walk to a colleague's desk instead of sending a message, when the answer needs a conversation anyway.
• Park at the far end of the lot, or get off a stop early, if you commute.

None of these adds much on its own. Their value is that they happen many times a day without anyone having to decide anything.

A lap every hour

Sitting for long stretches is the main thing a desk job does to you, and an hourly lap fixes steps and sitting at the same time. The World Health Organization advises adults to sit less and says that swapping sitting for movement of any intensity, light walking included, has benefits. Getting up from your desk about once an hour is a rhythm most people can keep.

Make the lap specific, so it doesn't turn into standing next to the chair checking your phone:

1. Stand up at the end of a task, a call or a focus block.
2. Walk somewhere with a turnaround point: the kitchen, the far window, the end of the corridor, the mailbox.
3. Take the long way back.
4. Keep it to two to five minutes.

Seven or eight of those across a working day add up to roughly 15 to 40 minutes on your feet, which is more than many desk days get in total.

Walk after lunch, and walk to end the day

Two longer walks anchor the day.

After lunch. Ten minutes at an easy pace, outside if you can. It breaks up the longest sit of the afternoon and gets you some daylight, and small studies suggest a light walk soon after eating softens the rise in blood sugar that follows a meal. Many people also find it takes the edge off the early afternoon slump. There is more on this in why a short walk after lunch makes the afternoon easier.

At the end of the workday. A short walk when you close the laptop marks the line between work and the evening, which matters most when you work from home and there is no commute to do it for you. Ten or fifteen minutes around the block is enough.

To make both stick, give them a slot. In Calendar on your Mac, create an event at the time you want to walk, set it to repeat (Custom lets you pick only the days you work), and add an alert at the start time. A walk with a place in the day survives far better than one you mean to fit in somewhere.

What a day with more steps looks like

At around a hundred steps a minute, that is several thousand more steps than a day spent going from the chair to the kitchen and back, with no workout in it at all. Start with two or three rows rather than the whole table. The walks that last are the ones that fit your actual day.

If walking brings on pain in your feet, knees or hips, or a health condition limits how far you can walk, ask a doctor or a physiotherapist what suits you, and start with what feels comfortable.

Remembering to walk when you're absorbed

Most of these ideas fail the same way. You agree with them at nine and forget them by eleven, because an absorbed hour passes without you noticing it. Notchpals gives the noticing to a bumblebee. Bizzy is one of the Movement characters that slide out of your Mac's notch in Notchpals, convinced the two of you are the busiest team in the hive, and two of Bizzy's visits line up with this post.

The Stand up visit is your hourly lap. It comes after close to an hour at the keyboard without a real break, and it counts only the time you are actually there: a walking call away from the desk adds nothing, and a few minutes up starts the count again. The Short walk visit comes once each early afternoon, which is useful on the days lunch ended at the desk.

BizzyPollen run! A little walk after lunch! Find one flower! Report back!

Press Done once you are on your feet. Press Later and Bizzy gives you twenty minutes before asking one more time. Notchpals doesn't count steps and can't tell whether you walked. It has to take your word for it. The walking is yours.