If one wanted to measure their physical activity levels, a popular and seemingly ubiquitous metric they would likely look to first is a daily step count. Maybe they'd see 1,000 steps per day, 5,000 steps per day, or 10,000 steps per day counted by their phone or watch. At face value, this measure gives feedback on their daily movement, and for that reason, it sells. For businesses it’s a dream metric: easy to monitor with cheap wearable technology and is strongly correlated with disease risk at a population level. So, private fitness enterprise tethers it’s marketing and technology to this metric.
But like any other fitness metric co-opted from public health research, it can quickly lose validity at the individual level. Take this example: if a kayaker is on the lake paddling for 3 hours and takes <1,000 steps that day, it would be ignorant to assume they are "inactive". Yet, compared to marketted standards, this is what their step count would illustrate.
Although it’s viewed as an accurate measure of light physical activity, “increasing steps” has no mention in our national recommendations. Although some research and private bodies suggest getting above the 10,000 thresholds, there is currently no standard "step target" for Canadians prescribed by any governing health body. This is because step count alone cannot account for differences in activity intensity, modality, or how movement is accumulated throughout the day.
But top voices in the exercise physiology field don't want to leave the public in the dark on their physical activity targets. So, some suggest a trend-only approach. For example, if 1,000 steps throughout the day are achieved while engaging in any lifestyle, surely getting 2,000 steps per day increases the activity in that lifestyle. Yet, if that extra 1,000 steps per day takes away from other, more intense modalities of physical activity, it may lower the total health benefits of all summated activities. Meaning this proposed solution still doesn’t cover the nuance of movement.
So, our guidelines shift the focus. Steps are classified as "low-intensity physical activity" - a category of activity not frequently quantified in public health guidance, because its ambiguity, variance, and periodic nature makes it hard to study formally. Currently, the CSEP guidelines recommend “Several hours of light physical activities, including standing”, partly for this reason. It's also much easier to reveal significant findings in a measurable timeframe when exercise is conducted at moderate to vigorous intensities, since the increased intensity induces greater adaptation in the shorter time-frames most studies run within. So, this is where our guidelines focus, rooted in peer-reviewed evidence.
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However, emerging research looks to solve the problem of articulating, and visualizing light physical activity recommendations by viewing current Canadian patterns from an antithetical perspective. For example, recent national-level publications ask questions such as: What if a more productive way of measuring activity isn't by how many steps someone achieves in a day, but how many hours of sedentary time their activity displaces?
There is a reason this distinction matters. ~45% of Canadians currently meet the moderate-to-vigorous physical activity guidelines set by the Canadian Society of Exercise Physiology. Yet only ~25% meet the recommendation for hours of sedentary time per day – set to less than eight.
This gap between the number of Canadians being active enough but being too sedentary appears oxymoronic. You would expect these numbers to match closely. Simply put, it should be expected that if people move more, they sit less. Yet this is not the case. The reason for this lies in how Canadians are making up for their lack of general activity. Possibly, the population is becoming more active, but the activity is preferentially intense and therefore doesn't displace enough sedentary hours. Our light physical activity is the one suffering. This is an issue because sedentary hours have independent effects that more-intense activity alone likely can't always correct for. But, to achieve 10,000 steps, most people would have to walk somehwere between 1 to 2.5 hours per day. This is hard to justify where profitable working hours are what our society values most. It simply takes too much time.
Therefore, this problem exists in part because the majority of sedentary hours are spent in workplaces that create barriers or lack opportunities to engage with movement. Work and light physical activity are given two seperate time-demanding silos, rather than being integrated. However, the blame is not on the workplace alone, this problem exists as a multivariate product of the systems that govern leisure, and therefore it would be unfair to solely pin the cause as workplace structure. It could also be rooted in city design, the percieved safety of walkable spaces, or local social cultures surrounding movement. It is however, clear to see it is not solely a matter of individual choice, as there are many Canadians who are getting enough moderate-to-vigorous activity, but unable to keep their sedentary hours reduced. Likely, if a cause, or solution exists, it first has to be found and justified using research that is grounded in this antithetical perspective on reducing sedentary hours.
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Looking beyond the systems level, it can be helpful to reduce the scope of this problem to the individual and see how this perspective change – from increasing activity, to reducing sedentary time - influences the interpretations drawn from their movement patterns.
Let's work through an example together:
Person A: Gets 45 minutes of physical activity daily at their local fitness center on the treadmill walking after working a desk job. They accumulate 8,000 steps per day.
Person B: Gets 45 minutes of physical activity daily, split into three, 15-minute walks outside or during work. They accumulate 8,000 steps.
If you've been convinced steps or minutes are the end-all-be-all of health, these two examples appear very similar, but they are not equivalent.
Person B breaks up sedentary hours with movement, potentially improving circulation, helping to regulate the blood sugar response from meals, or getting more exposure to the outdoors. That's not to say Person A should stop what they are doing, but it reveals more nuance step-tracking alone would not. With steps alone, one might assume they are 'making up' for their sedentary day.
This perspective change has clear implications at the individual level, but it can go far beyond. It tells us that maybe there are still problems to solve, even if a populations steps are measured as adequate. These discovered problems in leisure lead to more research, and the conclusions drawn from this could change our own thoughts on movement, back advocation for reduced barriers to it, create walkable workflows and environments, design tools to accurately track sedentary time, and potentially influence how our culture views and prioritizes leisure.
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The Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines already have begun to acknowledge this approach. They recommend replacing sedentary behaviour with physical activity, and trading light physical activity for more moderate-to-vigorous activity, while preserving sufficient sleep. But this recommendation neglects to acknowledge what happens when light physical activity is lost all together in the pursuit of combatting extended sedentary hours with moderate-to-vigorous exercise. So I encourage you to ask yourself: not just how am I moving, but what is my movement replacing?
Principal Sources
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