10,000 Steps!

There are some medical situations in which walking for a certain amount of time every day is recommended by the doctor. For example: Hypertension. And sometimes age and/or physical conditions make walking the only pragmatic form of exercise one can engage in.

Then there is the "odds and ends" walking one ought to do through the day as one goes about daily tasks and chores in one's office, neighborhood, market. Far better to just walk short distances that takes 5-10 minutes than using a vehicle for every thing!

Then there is the walking one does for the sheer pleasure of it! In beautiful gardens, parks, by silent and gurgling streams. Bliss!

Then there are the "problem solving" walks - hold a problem in your mind that you've been trying to solve and just go for a walk as you think through it. Or sometimes there's an audio lecture I need to listen to and I'll do this as I'm walking (somewhere where it's safe to do so - not on roads!).

But then there's a kind of walking I just don't understand: I see people who are perfectly capable of putting on their running shoes and going for a jog, or playing a sport like badminton, football, kho kho, basketball, table tennis, that gives the body a good workout, make one sweat, stretch - but instead of doing this, being alive, enthusiastic, sporty, having fun - they'll tell you: Oh now it's my time to exercise so now I'll go walk so many rounds of a ground. And then they'll often even wear an expensive watch that counts how many steps they walk - and start going round and round around a ground like a robot! I don't get it! Why would you be so uncreative?

PS: The 10,000 steps of walking per day advice is to encourage you to take Paragraph 2 above seriously - not to make a "circular walking robot" out of you! I'm sure someone jogging or playing a sport is deriving as much benefit from it, if not more, as someone walking round and round around!