Walktober: Supporting health and wellness, one step at a time

You’d be surprised how quickly your steps can add up.

After all, the average person takes about 500 steps over the course of a five-minute walk; on Studley Campus, that’s a quick stroll from the Hicks Building to the Rowe Management Building. Over the course of the day, the average Canadian accumulates approximately 3,500 to 5,000 steps.

But health research suggests that we should look at adding at least 2-3,000 additional steps to that number each day to improve our health, with 10,000 steps considered to be the benchmark for having an “active” lifestyle.

So how does one get to 10,000 steps? You count.

This month Dalhousie is organizing “Walktober,” a university-wide health and wellness competition that has faculty and staff signing up as teams and seeing just how far their steps will take them, logging daily progress via the WalkaboutNS website.

Already, with “Walktober” only in its opening days, there are more than 20 Dalhousie teams registered.

The initiative is being coordinated with support from the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the President’s Office and Human Resources, and coincides with October being National Healthy Workplace Month.

Full details: Healthy Dal blog

Making it easy

David Westwood, professor of Kinesiology at Dalhousie, is passionate about physical health at work. He uses a standing desk, is an avid squash player and regularly organizes “walking” meetings instead of seated ones. He also helped spark Dal's Walktober intiative together with Tristan Hopper (grad student in Dal’s Leisure Studies program) and Janice MacInnis (Dal's manager of organizational health) after learning about a Walkable Communities grant through the Heart and Stroke Foundation.  

“Sedentary lifestyles are a health risk,” says Dr. Westwood, explaining that extended periods of sitting increase cardiovascular risk factors for hypertension, diabetes, stroke, obesity and many other health conditions.

“We have this culture in our institutions and workplaces of sitting, or being sedentary for much of the day. There are norms we have to break down, but what better place to fit physical activity in than at work? We spend most of our day here, and often we have home or family commitments in the evening that take up a lot of our time. If you want to include more physical activity in your life, why not during the eight hours you’re here?”

The Walkabout NS website is full of tips and suggestions to help Walktober participants improve their step count: from hosting walking meetings and lunch breaks to following mapped walking routes — several of them put together by the Dalhousie organizers. These each come with step counts built in, so you know how much they add to your daily count.

And if the idea of increasing your daily steps — let alone reaching that 10,000 milestone — seems incredibly daunting, consider this: you can count “steps” in activities other than walking. Tristan Hopper, Walktober’s program coordinator and a grad student in Dal’s Leisure Studies program, explains you can use step conversion to account for other sorts of physical activity.

“Let’s say you’re not a walker but you’re a squash player, or a runner, or you’re chopping wood for the winter. You can go on and submit your activity on the Walkabout NS website and it will give you an equivalent step count to add to your daily total.”

Keeping track

As for how participants track their steps, Hopper says the best approach is to download a free smartphone app. (He recommends one called “Pacer” from the Apple App Store). Alternatively, you can use a pedometer: the Walktober team has a very limited number available that are largely spoken for, but they’re relatively inexpensive to purchase ($10 or so). You can also estimate distances walked or time spent on different activities and figure out step counts from there — another feature on the Walkabout NS website — or you can use the mapped routes provided.

There are participation prizes for Dal entrants, too: each week, prizes will be drawn at random for individuals who have accumulated days with physical activity.

While not everyone who takes part will necessary reach that 10,000 step milestone, the organizers say that’s not really the focus: it’s more about demonstrating how easy it is to be more active at work and finding ways to fit health and wellness activities into our daily lives.

“What’s great is that doing it with a team, and challenging other teams, makes it a social activity,” says Hopper. “We know from the literature that one of the largest barriers to participation in any kind of recreation or leisure activity is not having someone to share it with. And there’s lots of people to share it with here at Dal.”

“People who are more active are happier at work, more satisfied — and cause less strain on the health care plans that Dal and its employees pay into,” says Westwood. “A healthier Dal is better for all of us.”

Learn more about Walktober and how to register at the Healthy Dal blog.