After a few weeks of owning a treadmill, I can finally say that my average daily steps went up to at least 5000. Yes, I know that's not the advised 10k a day but I have a few reasons for not getting there (just yet).
First, the high blood pressure needing medical attention last month was an eye opener. After failing to get up and move more for weeks in a row, my blood pressure had enough and decided it would be out of control soon. After that, I started going on daily walks with my daughter twice every day until the treadmill arrived because I felt I could not just rely on the medication given to me and had a good scare to make a change for the better. During that week, I managed to get to 8 or even 9 thousand steps every day without much struggle on some days while on other days I would be happy going above 5000.
I'm not wearing my smartwatch every moment of the day neither am I carrying around my phone constantly. This means, whenever I'm feeling bothered by the watch due to it needing to be tight for measurements, or when I'm having a sore wrist from typing with the watch bothering me, I take it off and sometimes it stays off for half of the day. This means, it doesn't register a lot of steps. Whenever I go for a walk of treadmill exercise, I usually remember to put it back on so these steps will be registered.
Something that I find highly annoying is that whenever I go on the treadmill, the steps do not reflect on the actual steps taken or the distance walked. I've tried to always start a workout with indoor walk on the watch before turning on the belt of the treadmill, but unless I keep swinging my arms back and forward constantly, it does not register the steps properly.
I hate doing that though because it sometimes brings me out of balance and I also often either hurt my hand or bump my watch on the machine when I do that. I want to be very careful not hurting my knee, so I benefit more from walking and not moving my arms but holding the machine instead until I feel that I'm walking steady without running out of balance. I hope I can manage to make my knees stronger again before I have another misstep as I had a few times last year, especially with this shitty insurance excluding any knee related issues, sigh.
So my step count is often not reflecting my actual count, which is a bummer, I wonder if this would be the same with other smart watches, although I'm not considering changing this one as long as it's not broken.
In the end it's the health improvement that counts and I see that there are positive changes, even if I have a day or two without the step count goal, I'm still working on it and making progress.
To avoid constant disappointment about not reaching the step goal, I will just leave it at 5000 and hope I go past it several days, even though I know that some days I go far beyond it without it being registered lol. I prefer seeing I achieved 5000 steps almost every day over constantly reading a pop up message stating "you only reached your step goal 2 days this week".
Anyway, I'm taking it step by step :-)
