TEN thousand steps a day.
That’s what they say we should
be walking to keep healthy. And
this little offering each month is
called Perambulations given that I
think through what to write while
reaching my 10,000th step each
evening!
Last month I asked for the evidence
that five (or is it now seven?) portions
of fruit and vegetable (or maybe more
vegetable than fruit!)
is the right
amount to be
consuming.
And today
I’m trawling
the literature
asking how we
came up with a nice round figure of
10,000 steps a day. And is that 10,000
nimble little steps or 10,000 great
hulking strides?
The idea of 10,000 steps came from
work in Japan way back in the 1960s
where Dr Yoshiro Hatano found that
most people were actually only walking
between 3,500 and 5,000 steps a day.
He reasoned that increasing this to
10,000 steps would burn more calories
and make people thinner and fitter.
So no great scientific breakthrough,
no ash of academic brilliance; just
some basic measurements of what
people did, matched with a bit of
common sense. And following that
there has been a veritable rash of
research showing how beneficial
increasing one’s exercise can be.
We know all too well that the
epidemic of obesity in the human
population is mirrored in our pets.
And just as in people the key factors
in stopping weight gain in people are
reducing food intake and increasing
exercise, the same must be true of
dogs.
Yet it seems that the majority of
the emphasis in tackling the canine
obesity problem is directed towards
sensible dietary advice. There is very
little concrete advice on exercise needs
for our canine companions – 30 to 60
minutes a day is just about as definite a measure as you can get.
Of course, exercise requirements are going to differ with breed and age,
but has anybody looked, as Hatano did
50-odd years ago for people, at how
many paces a fit and healthy dog does
in a day?
One paper from JAVMA back
in 2005 showed that pedometers
measure activity in dogs reasonably
accurately although they overestimated
the number of steps by around
17% in large and medium dogs and
underestimated the number of steps
by approximately 7% in small dogs.
At a trot or run, accuracy improved
markedly. Perhaps not surprisingly,
amount of exercise every day was
inversely correlated with body
condition score.
But in fact it is back to Japan we
have to turn for a
canine pedometer
commercially available for the general dog
owner. It was at the
Fujitsu Ubiquitous
Service Business Unit
where the “Wandant”
dog pedometer was
developed.
The pedometer
functions using
the same sort of
accelerometers used
in mobile phones – an
area where Fujitsu
was already ahead of
the game. The trouble was, of course,
that there are significant differences
between the bone structures of people
and dogs. Add to that the fact that
dogs have several different ways of
walking and running.
It was impossible just to transfer
the technology to the dog pedometers
without substantial modi cation. The
dog pedometer developers gathered
data from sensors attached to the dogs
and videoing their behaviour.
Work from Cornell showed that daily step counts in a group of dogs
ranged from 5,500 steps to nearly
40,000 among the 77 medium and large
dogs. The animals’ body condition
scores were again, not unsurprisingly,
inversely correlated with average daily
step count.
So where does that leave us?
Should we be suggesting that as
well as weighing out their pet’s daily
food portions, owners should be
counting their steps? From a personal
perspective, I can tell you that
measuring my daily step count has
had a pretty profound effect on my
exercise.
If I end the day on less than 10,000
steps, I take a brisk walk down the
road and back for just long enough to
ensure that I reach the magic number.
Call me somewhat OCDish if you like, but before I bought
my £5 pedometer
from eBay I didn’t
have a clue what my
level of exercise was.
And increasing it has
certainly had an effect
as the bathroom scales
show.
Just being able to
measure what you
are doing can change
what you do. The
same could be said
for cows. How far do
they walk in a day?
You might question whether anyone is bothered! But
in fact monitoring the exercise of
dairy cattle has been shown to have
considerable bene ts in determining
whether they are showing the early
stages of lameness and so allow rapid
intervention to maintain their welfare.
So whether it’s dogs or cows or
people, perhaps exercise assessment
can be a key to a healthier life. Now if
you will forgive me, I feel the need to
get off my backside and practice what
I preach!
