Urban India fails 10,000 steps daily

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Malathy Iyer TNN

Mumbai: At a time when leisure time physical activity — or LTPA, as it is increasingly being called, is emerging as the global mantra for health, urban India seems clued out.
A new survey suggests that one of the reasons that Corporate India is sluggish could be the poor levels of physical activity among its white-collar workforce. About 60% of the 17,000 corporate employees who participated in the pan-India survey admitted to exercising three times a week and that, too, for less than 30 minutes at a stretch. The benefit of a brisk walk or the power of 10,000 steps daily in shaping one’s health is clearly not popular as yet here.
A study in the ‘Lancet’ medical journal recently estimated that physical inactivity caused 6 to 10% of all deaths from major non-communicable diseases such as coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and breast and colon cancers.
It showed that inactivity caused 5.3% of the 57 million deaths that occurred worldwide in 2008. The idea of underlining the problem was to show that the solution was simple: increase in leisure time physical activity. 30-min walk can keep you healthy: WHO
Dr Aashish Contractor, a preventive cardiologist at Asian Heart Institute in Bandra Kurla Complex, said: “Research has shown that leisure time physical activity is beneficial for all.”
LTPA is different from a planned exercise regimen. Instead of pumping iron at the local gym, the World Health Organisation has said people can be healthy by being physically active — like walking briskly, skipping, swimming — for up to 30 minutes every day. In fact, the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine has categorized people on the basis of the number of steps they take: people who take less than 5,000 steps a day are sedentary, those who take between 5,000 and 7,500 are low on activity, those taking between 7,500 and 10,000 are somewhat active and the active ones take between 10,000 and 12,000 steps a day.
In the Sixties, Japanese walking clubs adopted a local pedometer’s nickname for their product — manpo-kei (‘ten thousand step meter’) — as the standard. The Japanese mantra of 10,000 steps a day translates into walking 6.4km a day. But in corporate India, the daily step count rarely crosses 3,000.