How can people average 65000 steps per day consistently?

[MihaiMVP]

Hello, there are some really fit people out there! But this amount of steps would imply tremendous effort and also time dedication. Are all these people mailmen? Maybe throwing in a marathon or two after-work?

It will be interesting to share whether you deem this possible or not, and how such a walking experience would affect / improve one's health and daily life.

[Dominique]

We are really beating a dead horse here. Anyone who has actually managed to get 50k+ in a day should know it is impossible to replicate it day in day out, even if you are the proverbial mailman. It’s best to focus on one’s own steps and ignore people with unrealistically high step counts.

[nadinb]

Jeeps? Potholes? My Fitbit has been known to register those. And even then, not 60K

[MihaiMVP]

Yes, bumps can add to step count too, if they are regular. And from what I have noticed, if I do a lot of steps on a certain day, the following few days I also tend to do quite a bit more, like the legs want to keep going 🙂

[Patrick]

I was a mail carrier some years back.

They certainly could crush 50K steps daily; it's a bad example

They spend about two hours casing mail, then go out on the road for 4 hours. Then come back and case the next day's mail.

I'm quite sure 50,000 steps a days is easy for a mail carrier. Not to mention they often fill in by working a sixth day for the overtime.

But in general I agree. Knocking down 50K every day is tough work for the person who has other things going on in their life.

[Dixiedrifter]

Getting unusually high numbers of steps per day is easily accomplished. A few years ago, I read where a woman clipped her Fitbit to her Mixmaster and was able to accumulate a serious amount of steps with virtually no effort. Imagine clipping a Fitbit to a ceiling fan during your sleeping hours? The totals would be incredible. I personally like the steps that are counted during the time I am operating my riding lawnmower or field tractors. Just yesterday I hit over 26,000 steps and prior to climbing on the mower, I measured 5,700 from my morning walk and related movements!

Think outside the box and you too can be idolized and worshiped as a "top-stepper".

[Dominique]

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@Patrick wrote:

I was a mail carrier some years back.
They certainly could crush 50K steps daily; it's a bad example
They spend about two hours casing mail, then go out on the road for 4 hours. Then come back and case the next day's mail.

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I don’t know about you, but I get about 7000 steps per hour when brisk walking. I would therefore need 7+ hours of non-stop brisk walking in order to get 50k+ steps per day. That means no pause for going to the bathroom, eating etc.

Now, you may say I’m "only" getting 7000 steps per hour because I’m an old fart past his prime. Surely, a young, perky mailman would "easily" get 10,000 steps per hour. Now I challenge you to do the following: install a metronome app on your phone and set it to a pace of 166 beat per minute; start walking following that pace and let me know if you can keep it for more than 5 minutes. That’s almost 3 steps per second, it’s insane, no way anyone could sustain that for hours on end.

[SunsetRunner]

I have a friend in his early 60's he still runs marathons and cycles to and from work everyday. He just got back from the Paris marathon a couple months ago. He runs every day and trains in martial arts as well. He easily clocks up 60k steps counts every day and has a resting heart in the 40's There is hardly a month that goes by where he isn't running in at least 1 or 2 marathon or half marathons. I manage 20k steps in one day distance was approximately 17kms and while that was a big achievement for me to manage it took me 3 hours (I have a bad knee and chubby disposition)

[Dominique]

Let’s do some basic math: the running stride of a person of average height is about 1 meter. A marathon is about 42 kilometers (42,000 meters), so running a full marathon "only" gets you about 42k steps. Now, maybe your friend the marathoner has very short legs and his running stride is only 75 cm: even though, a full marathon will only get him 56k steps. So if he’s getting 60k+ steps everyday, he’s basically running at the very least the equivalent of a full marathon everyday. Now, I’ve never run a marathon myself (the most I’ve done is a half-marathon), but I’ve talked to people who have, and have had a look at the typical training programmes for marathoners and they don’t involve running marathons everyday.

Just ask your friend to post the 24-hour graph for steps on a day he’s running a competitive marathon. Here is mine from 6-Nov-2016, when I ran the Golden Gate half-marathon in San Francisco:

The race started at 7am and I completed it in about 2 hours. I got about 850 steps per slice of 5 minutes, translating into 10.2k per hour and 20.4k for the entire race. If I had been able to keep that pace for 4 hours (full marathon), that would have got me 40.8k steps, consistent with what I stated above.

24-hour step graphs don’t lie. This is why I always tell high-steppers to post theirs.

[Dixiedrifter]

Good for you! I’ve always looked at my walking/running challenge as competition against myself. Every individual deals with different circumstances, as such, developing a routine which allows one to reach their objective is way more successful than trying to achieve somebody else’s goal(s).

Sent from my iPhone

[Patrick]

"I don’t know about you, but I get about 7000 steps per hour when brisk walking. I would therefore need 7+ hours of non-stop brisk walking in order to get 50k+ steps per day. That means no pause for going to the bathroom, eating etc."

What you are presuming is that a mail carrier only walks during the four plus hours on the road.

So if we go with the 7K per hour you have 28K for the time he  or she is delivering mail, over half of the daily 50K.

Then as I mentioned you have the office time casing mail. This isn't an office where you sit at a desk. Carriers walk back and forth constantly bringing mail to the case and rarely sit. (Many end their careers with horrible knee problems).

And this is just the 8 hours they spend at work. So normal movement outside of work adds more steps.

No need for us to quibble about whether a carrier walks 50K a day or not. You think they do not and obviously I think they do. The normal person does not, I agree. I work at a desk all day long, walk/run for an hour in the evening and I get about 10K a day. I admire people who can do 25 regularly, but I agree; 50 on a regular basis seems nuts.

[Patrick]

Reviewing your comment about the metronome app...

"install a metronome app on your phone and set it to a pace of 166 beat per minute; start walking following that pace and let me know if you can keep it for more than 5 minutes. That’s almost 3 steps per second, it’s insane, no way anyone could sustain that for hours on end."

Had me go back to my recollections of how many stops the typical carrier makes. I believe it is roughly 140. Allow me a little latitude, but using a residential neighborhood (and even discounting the likelihood of carrier going up stairs to reach a porch and mailbox) the carrier need to proceed from door to door.I've never measured, but I would think it is reasonable that such a neighborhood would require at least 200 steps from door to door.

So, 140 stops with 200 steps between stops and that's the 28K.

So I don't know about the metronome, but it seems to me that you are using "bursts" when you tally and believe that a person who walks occasionally each day can be compared to the stamina of someone who walks steadily for 4 hours each day.

By the way, when you speak of the time spent for eating I imagine you mean a mid-day meal roughly at noon hour. The Postal Service here in the U.S. allots an extra 30 minutes for carriers so that time wasn't included in the 8 hour day I described.

[SunsetRunner]

As I said he not only runs every day but works as well. If I just go for my normal daily walk and then just do things around the house like normal I can clock up 15k steps and that is by doing hardly anything on account of my knee. He climbs stairs and walks or cycles to meetings and while I'm not going to go follow and count every step he does I can easily see how he gets as many steps as he does. he is on the go all day and hardly sits down. He is also renovating his home on his own as well. If you are active and on the go from 6am to 9pm everyday then 60k steps is not that hard to achieve. If I can get 20k in a couple of hours by waddling around the park then anyone that moves faster and more than I do can easily get there.

Now if it was 160k steps a day I would be suspicious. 

[MihaiMVP]

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@SunsetRunner wrote:

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Now if it was 160k steps a day I would be suspicious. 

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That would be like roaming all day and night ...

I have also noticed that waiters tend to a lot of walking, now sure how much of that would a tracker record, though.

[Dominique]

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@SunsetRunner wrote:

I can get 20k in a couple of hours by waddling around the park 

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Sorry, but you don’t get 10k steps per hour by "waddling" around the park.

I just came back from a two hours of brisk walking, covering slightly more than 12 km (average speed: about 6 km/h). Here is a summary of that walk:

Yes, although I never stop at any point, it "only" got me 15.6k steps. Here is how steps were distributed on the 24-hour activity graph:

Each bar represents steps taken during slices of 5 minutes. The tallest bar was 689 steps, the average was about 635.

Can you post the same graph with your two hours of "waddling around the park"? It should show green bars averaging 835 steps. That’s 167 steps per minute, some serious waddling...

[Dominique · Accepted solution]

@MihaiMVP wrote:

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I have also noticed that waiters tend to a lot of walking

The ultimate high-stepper: someone working as a mailman by day, and as a waiter in evenings/weekends 

[Patrick]

I would not have replied except you came back to the mail carrier;

You say you can do 15.6K in two hours yet you seem to think that a carrier cannot do 28K in four hours.

I agree with your belief that "normal" may be around 7K per hour. I work at a desk from around 7 AM to about 6 PM. I get around 3K during that time. Then an hour of walking/running and I total out at around 10K a day. So I am sedentary most of a day and still average 10K.

Someone who walks for most of the day should be able to reach the numbers that you think are improbable. When you compare someone who walks here and there for an hour or two to someone whose career is walking day in and day out it is like comparing a sprinter to a marathoner. The analysis of one can't be directly applied to the other.

Been an interesting conversation, thanks.

[Incognito028]

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@Patrick wrote:

I would not have replied except you came back to the mail carrier;

You say you can do 15.6K in two hours yet you seem to think that a carrier cannot do 28K in four hours.

I agree with your belief that "normal" may be around 7K per hour. I work at a desk from around 7 AM to about 6 PM. I get around 3K during that time. Then an hour of walking/running and I total out at around 10K a day. So I am sedentary most of a day and still average 10K.

Someone who walks for most of the day should be able to reach the numbers that you think are improbable. When you compare someone who walks here and there for an hour or two to someone whose career is walking day in and day out it is like comparing a sprinter to a marathoner. The analysis of one can't be directly applied to the other.

Been an interesting conversation, thanks.

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My next door neighbor is a mail carrier. He does not reach those numbers. He says on average it would be 25k-30k steps. From my door to his door is about 70 steps. Mail carriers take the shortest route from door to door, so they do not walk back out to the sidewalk to go from house to house if they can cut through yards and driveways. So your "200" per door to door can easily be cut down to 50-75 steps on most occasions. And not to mention the few seconds of downtime placing the mail in the box, scanning packages and leaving undeliverable notes on doors. This also includes time to load up the bag during their routes and also the time it takes to transport their truck to the next stop on the route. So when my neighbor says closer to 30k, I believe him over you any day.

[Patrick]

Your neighbor said what I said, which was 28K on the road.

He also knows he is not supposed to cut across lawns. ;~)

[crazyhbomb]

Hey all!  I felt the need to respond to this, and hopefully shed some light.  

I'm 45 years old, and currently a restaurant server.  I work a Mon-Fri am breakfast shift, and this restaurant is kind of a **ahem** show.  The manager has no clue on how to hire, nor properly staff, and to top, is an incredibly aggressive person to work for.  None of my other fellow employees desire to work the 5am breakfast shift, but myself (I enjoy having my evenings free). Since my schedule is during the week in the am, my manager feels it is not as busy at the restaurant, so I am the only one scheduled to work.  I always arrive earlier than I am scheduled, because I am THE ONLY one there to set-up the restaurant.  This restaurant is attached to a hotel, so as soon as those doors open, I have "business women/men" wanting their coffee/breakfast in a hurry, because they have meetings. Breakfast then turns directly into lunch, and those same individuals are back for more. I also work with insubordinate millennials, that do not know the meaning of "clean up after yourself", so I am also having to clean up after my "fellow employees". From 5am-3pm, I'm running like crazy trying to give the "best service" I possible can, and complete all my duties. So, if you can imagine, I am literally moving, THE WHOLE TIME!  It would be almost impossible for me to get a moment to eat/go to the bathroom/drink water during that 8-9 hour shift! 

Needless to say, once I have finished my shift, and have returned home, I am excited to take a look at my Fitbit, and I would average 15k-20k per shift.  There were a couple times where I hit 40k after I had worked a double(5am-9pm shift), but would find myself very sore afterwards, and hard to move the next day.  Mind you, these are all very face-paced steps, almost like sprinting.  So, to answer this question, I find it incredibly hard for someone to hit 60k "steps", or more in one day legitimately. 

In the end, I support all my friends that are genuinely trying to make a healthy difference in their lives here in the Fitbit community.  If you would like to watch me rack up my steps as I take everyones food orders, please do!  Because, trust me, these guests(on average) are not so nice, and can be down right hurtful.  There's not only sweat that is shed while taking these steps, but at times some tears.  I need all the positive support I can get!

Good luck to everyone, and much love!

Heather