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Less than 25 percent of Americans walk for more than ten minutes continuously in a typical week
(www.sciencedaily.com)
That's not very much walking
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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traingang
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Don't you have to do this just for grocery shopping? Like I know some people do the online ordering but just walking around Walmart takes like 20 minutes even if you're just shopping for yourself.
The study focuses on transportation and as the blurb reads I think this excludes being inside a walmart or similar as being in a place instead of transporting from one to another. Still fucking dire though
A week is abysmal… But it’s as you say, most people with desk jobs are in an office park or some bleak suburban corporate zone. In order to have basic daily (or in this case, weekly) physical activity you really have to go out of your way to do it for the sake of itself. My mom has to walk laps around her office building.
I’m glad I’ve mostly moved away from field work at my job but I’ll do it gladly when they need me just so I don’t have to spend 100% of my time at a desk behind a screen.
In completely unrelated figures, 45% of American households have a dog.
Could roughly work out to the 25% of Americans that walk for more than ten minutes being the dog walkers of those households.
That's not how statistics works. Even if the 10m walkers are maximally represented among dog-keeping households (instead of more evenly distributed), with no more than one walker per dog household (also extremely unlikely to not be clustered), at most 50% of dogs get walks from their owners.
Also, I have 0 dogs and I walk/run/bike 30-150 minutes a day.
Was more of a hopeful estimate than anything. From what I've seen of American dog owners they seem to just have dogs run around in their backyards and call it at that.
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oh god
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Sometimes I wonder if my fascination with the idea of arcologies is just a desperate yearning for walkable neighborhoods.
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Scheisse, I walk or run 20-30 minutes a day in the UK, and that's still less than ideal.
Pretty sure this puts you well within the german recommendations about this at least to the level of "won't just fall apart at 40"
i grew up in a shithole american suburb, one of those housing developments with no sidewalks, no streetlights, just an enclave of cheap houses 4 miles up a 55mph canyon road with no shoulders. it was literally impossible to walk to any type of shop for the first 22 years of my life. i hated it so much i put all of my life's energies into getting the fuck out and living somewhere urban. after getting priced out of one metro area, we were able to relocate somewhere cheaper and buy a home. now, i measure how good my weekend was by how little i needed to drive. i've got bars, shops, and 
restaurants within 1 mile in every direction. it really is a blessed existence. i work with suburboids who are too scared to go on walks. if it isn't a walk from the parking lot to the store, or up the driveway, to their house, they won't do it. i desperately want to visit one of those european cities that was developed before the existence of the automobile so i can experience life how it was meant to be lived - locally, on two feet.
america is a deeply sick place.
i work with suburboids who are too scared to go on walks. if it isn't a walk from the parking lot to the store, or up the driveway, to their house, they won't do it
This picks up two points I that are dear to me and they're both just "it's also very much a cultural issue". Both on the suburban anxiety disorder and also on the part of how 10 minutes of continous walking is very well within territory of walking to two stores from the parking lot without moving your car. Fuck, some of them driveways in the US, probably.
It is an issue of infrastructure, absolutely, but you have to negatively incentivize people out of cars or they'll never stop, because that's like asking them to take a hot air balloon to whereever they're going. It's just not an option for them.
My relative was an exhange student in the US in the 70s and has told me that one of the problems she ran into with the host family was the way she would just go for walks and jogs around the area by herself. This was somehow super dangerous and unheard of, she said the area was just a basic suburb.
It's an entirely different outlook on life.
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oh yeah, that's real. in my family of ~5, I'm the only one doing that. I'm the eccentric one.
pointing out that this low bar is a recommended baseline for maintaining mobility and cognition among the geriatric is not well received.
legit, if they walk more than 200 yards, they act like they're on a literal death march.
When my wife and I visited my parents out in the country, she was adamant about us keeping up our walking routine. But there is just no place we could find to walk. The small country roads have too many logging trucks (and no sidewalk), the only place to go are hiking trails but my wife wanted to get steps in and not hike up a mountain, so it wasn't her thing and that's understandable.
In the end we just walked around the yard for an hour each day avoiding fire ants and ticks. One day we just went to a Wal Mart and walked for an hour. And we definitely got stares and remarks from our family. Seeing someone walk around is just out of this world for them, and it makes sense given the environment completelt stacked against it.
And this discussion about walking and geriatric health hits real hard because my mom is constantly depressed and sits inside all day. I try to kindly nudge her and ask if she had gone outdoors any and she always says "no". But I know that even if she wanted to go outside, there are just very limited options of places to casually walk around in. You'd have to drive 40 minutes to get to a small park where you can walk around the little league baseball field.
Just a very hostile place all around. It's sad
My hot crank take theory is that all the stuff about "ergonomic sitting" is just bullshit pseudoscience. You're just not meant to sit for 8 hours in a cubicle and no amount of lumbar support is going to fix the underlying problem.
My even hotter crank theory is that much of geriatric mobility issue is caused by just becoming sedentary. We somehow recognize being a couch potato is bad for you, except if you're over 60, at which point any movement kills you or whatever.
somewhere in my early 40s I decided I would work to develop all the positive habits a very healthy elderly person would have.
- early morning stretching for hips, back, posture and flexibility maintenance.
- stay hydrated, plenty of water
- plenty of rest (early to bed, early to rise), small cat nap at lunch
- ~2+ mile walk a day
- always take the stairs, nice and easy
- no booze, no tobacco
I try to never rush, and instead be methodical. no high impact shit that is tough on joints. no more knock around b.s. or high intensity stuff. wear the kneepads, the gloves, the helmet, etc. squat to work low. take breaks, don't cut corners.
I am saving up to get myself into a situation where I can have a little sauna or steam shower for a daily sweat too. it's probably a few years away still, but I'm looking forward to it most of all.
anyway, I figured if I laid the foundation for this sort of lifestyle and general approach to maintenance now, the psychological transition to being legit old as fuck would be gentle, assuming I manage to show up. I came up with this olan watching a lot of older boomers trying to fight old age and, inevitably, lose more than they wagered; fast and hard with a lot of ego-driven grief. I see myself as a realist: I can picture how I end up, best case, so I figure I might as well start puttering on over there while I can make choices about the pace. Valhalla ain't real.
the irony is, my colleagues think I am like 10 years younger than I really am because all these mostly easy little moves accumulate and seem to slow what we think of as aging.
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My even hotter crank theory is that much of geriatric mobility issue is caused by just becoming sedentary. We somehow recognize being a couch potato is bad for you, except if you're over 60, at which point any movement kills you or whatever.
As I understand it that's also why broken hips have such a high mortality rate: the injury itself isn't particularly dangerous, but even with a hip replacement regaining mobility is difficult and painful and if someone doesn't manage it they'll be bedridden and suffer a pretty rapid decline over the next year or so.
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almost every part of the country is a web of hostile architecture and islands between which only cars can flow readily.
True enough but it also points to a cultural problem. That is 500m / 0,3 miles of walking at the low end. That is "not taking your car from one side of the strip mall to the other"-territory and similar cases.