Anecdata:

I recently visited Amsterdam with my wife. On the less active days, just leaving our room 3x a day for food and weed put us way over 10k steps every day. We were hitting 30k on our really touristy days. Now I'm back at my house in an American suburb and struggling to get 5k naturally.

From my point of view, the problem is most of the built environment caters toward cars and not enough toward outdoor living space.

The damn 'burbs. Nothing to walk to, everything's been spread way too far apart. Maybe a park or neighborhood pool if you're lucky. Too much non-place taking up space between places is killer. Literally, given heart disease.

You don't need a destination when the walk is the goal.

I can only speak for myself but it's far easier, psychologically, for me to go out and walk somewhere when I have a goal besides just walking. While a destination is not necessary in the strictest sense, not having a reason besides exercise is a substantial barrier.

If you can walk to the places you need to get to, then you don't even need to go out of your way to hit the step goal.

It's a shame that we (Americans) don't build cities this way, instead requiring that we drive everywhere. It's bad for the environment as well as our health.

Yeah but the walk in those environments just sucks. Loud traffic, no sidewalks, nothing to look at. When I visit Canada, I always miss walking in the woods, because the paths just don't exist. In Germany they're literally everywhere.

Is this in America? I found it much harder to get in American than I do now that I've moved to Ireland. I walk mostly everywhere (weather permitting) and rarely get below 10k a day. I'm actually closer to 12k a day, and 8 km. On the year so far I'm averaging over 14,400. And I wouldn't say I walk a tremendous amount -- just when I can (though I do enjoy it), sometimes with running in depending on weather and other things.

Working from home I find it nearly impossible. Even using a standing desk, using the bathroom on the other floor instead of the one near me, trying not to ignore my watch when it says to get up and walk, etc... I'll often end up with less than 2k steps.

Take your work meetings on a pair of headphones while dialing in, instead of video conferencing in.

Take a fifteen walk once a day while sorting out your daily schedule, working on a hard problem, etc.

Personally, that cooped up feeling from being stuck inside all day is one of the reasons why I moved out of the city and onto some property. 30m of daily outside chores (work breaks, lunch breaks, replacement for a "commute") and I easily get 10k steps a day.

>Personally, that cooped up feeling from being stuck inside all day is one of the reasons why I moved out of the city and onto some property.

As someone who moved from a city to a rural area over the pandemic and saw their exercise suffer massively, this rings oddly to me. In a city I was getting huge step counts because there were so many places to go, so much to see and do! Leaving the house was immediately rewarding. Out in the boondocks, sure there's plenty of space to walk, but there's nowhere you can feasibly walk to.

That actually helps, thank you. A lot of my meetings lately are non-video so I could easily take those while walking.

I'm working on moving into a city. The plan is to get rid of the car and I think that'll make a huge improvement in health.

Buy a collie. They LIVE for walks. Ours goes 3-4 miles a day. She cares about walks more than food. And she derives absolute joy from them. Just walking around new neighborhoods and she looks at me every day with sheer bliss during and after. Very motivating.

The idea is you also have to walk for exercise, not just incidentally. I wfh and aim for two 2-3 mile walks a day and get in about 15000 steps. Takes about 1.5 hours out of my day but I'd just be zoning out watching a screen otherwise.

Get a dog, 10k becomes very easy when you have to walk the dog a few kilometers every day.