My Wife: The Insane Walker

She gets 30,000+ steps a day thanks to a treadmill desk—and she's better for it. Here are 8 things she's learned along the way.

Post summary

• My wife, Leah, got a treadmill desk earlier this year.

• Now she steps far more than me. And probably you. And, the studies suggest, even more than the most active people on Earth.

• It’s wild, it’s crazy—it’s the Two Percent mindset at its finest.

• We’ll cover how to walk more throughout the day, tactics for treadmill desks, and wisdom from others who have significantly increased their step counts.

Housekeeping

• ICYMI, Two Percent ran a Substack chat yesterday. We shared how we exercised and spent our Sundays, and swapped some dog photos and powerful tips.

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Audio/podcast version

The post

I used to be the active one in my family. But those days are dead.

Every morning at seven A.M., I’m reminded of my new role as the lazy one. It’s a whirring noise overlaid with plop, plop, plop, and the clattering of keys.

It persists largely uninterrupted until about 3:30 P.M. and sounds like this:

My wife, Leah, got a treadmill desk in February. This treadmill desk, specifically. She now uses it in the sense that humans use oxygen.

The numbers don’t lie:

• 31,576

That’s Leah’s average daily step count since getting the treadmill desk, or about six times more steps than the average American. A few days, she’s gotten more than 40,000 steps.

Leah has effectively entered her own personal, never-ending walkathon.

And those steps have come mindlessly, without serious conscious effort—all while she works.

You all know how I feel about treadmills for dedicated walking and running—I’d rather go outside because there are trails to be explored.

But if you’re looking to sneak more activity into your day, a treadmill desk is a hell of a cheat code.

It’s pure Two Percent mindset: Finding ways to make something you’re already doing just a bit harder to get more. Embracing short-term discomfort for a massive long-term benefit. Leah has to be at her desk—might as well step like hell while she’s there.

Today’s post will cover:

• How many steps the human body evolved to get for health.

• 8 lessons Leah has learned during her nine-month (and counting!) walkathon.

• Tactics to get the most from using a treadmill desk.

Humans took many steps—until we didn’t

• Section summary: Human in the past got more activity in one day than the average American gets in one week. Our bodies are likely adapted to those high levels of activity.

The modern economy chains many of us to desks, where we do all sorts of work to earn a paycheck and survive. Even jobs we may assume are active, like farming, have largely been mechanized and made sedentary.

This is new. Up until about 10,000 years ago, every human had basically the same three jobs:

1. Find food.

2. Raise kids.

3. Don’t die.

Completing those three work tasks took a lot of activity.

Scientists recently tracked the step counts of 161 Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. Researchers study tribes like the Hadza because they provide a model for how humans lived in ancient history.

If you can figure out how active hunter-gatherers are, you can make some reasonable assumptions about the amount of activity the human body requires for optimal health.

The average tribe member took 15,047 steps a day.

They’re no Leah Easter.

But they are, obviously, far more active than the average American, who gets ~5,000ish daily steps.

I spoke to anthropologists at Harvard and USC. They believe the human body is adapted to those high levels of physical activity. If we don’t get it, sickness tends to slowly set in.

The study also showed that the Hadza get about 175 minutes a day of what researchers call “moderate-to-vigorous physical activity,” or MVPA. For most people, MVPA is basically a fast walk.¹

The U.S. Government and World Health Organization recommend that we all get a minimum of 150 minutes of MVPA a week. Yet fewer than half of Americans hit the weekly MVPA recommendations. So, yes, the Hadza get more activity in one day than the average American gets all week.

Why we don’t move as much as we used to

• Section summary: Humans evolved to avoid extra activity—this backfires in the modern world where we don’t have to be active to survive.

Activity and our modern lack of it is one of those situations where I like to say, “It’s not your fault. But it is your problem to solve.”

Humans evolved to avoid extra activity. Yes, our ancestors were highly active—but they had to be active to survive.

It’s never made sense to “exercise,” or move for the sake of it. This is because food has always been scarce, so ancient humans didn’t want to burn any extra energy that wasn’t going toward acts like finding food. We’re effectively wired for laziness.

Yet our environment has changed. We’ve engineered our world for comfort and inactivity—we have cars, escalators, grocery stores, desk-bound jobs, and more.

But we still have those ancient genes telling us to avoid unnecessary activity in a world where we can survive and be relatively inactive. Our lazy genes now backfire.

To be healthy, we have to make up creative ways to add activity back into our lives, like “exercise.”

Or, as Leah found, using a treadmill desk.

8 lessons from 30K+ steps a day

Leah began her never-ending walkathon thanks to a one-month corporate step challenge.

Her employer challenged its workers to get as many steps as possible. The person who got the most steps on their team won extra money in their health savings account.

“The funny thing is our health plans don’t actually come with a health savings account,” Leah said. “So winning basically meant I’d get a bunch of fake money I couldn’t use.”

But competition is competition, and failure was not an option (as you’ll soon learn).

The corporate step competition ended long ago, but Leah’s walking habit persists.

Here’s what she’s learned along the way:

1. Treadmill desks make activity easier

So, the challenge starts. Leah is dead set on winning. She plans all sorts of walks in the morning, at lunch, and after work.

But, of course, life would intervene. Leah told me this:

I feel like everyone knows they should be more active. Before I got the treadmill desk I’d plan to, like, go for a walk at lunch. Or after work. But then, of course, some meeting would pop up during lunch. Or it would be 115 degrees outside by the time the workday was done.

I think when people plan to be active but aren’t it weighs on us. It weighed on me. I’d tell myself I was going to get in a bunch of steps but then something would happen and I couldn’t. So the whole time I was at work, I’d be frustrated because I couldn’t get steps in, then I’d feel like a lazy ass sitting around all day.

The treadmill desk has totally taken the pressure off. I get in a ton of steps while doing work. So if an outdoor walk I planned at lunch or something has to get canceled, it’s like, ‘whatever. I was still super active today.’

2. Treadmill desks are “like mindless eating, but for steps.”

Leah told me this:

“You know how sometimes you’ll be eating, like, chips, and you look down and you’ve eaten way more than you want? That’s mindless eating. Well, a treadmill desk is like that but for steps.

I’ll be researching some law and get totally lost in the research. Then I’ll look at my pedometer and realize I’ve added another 7,000 steps while researching the law.”

3. If you want to know your numbers, use a hip-based pedometer

Day one with the treadmill desk. Leah spends all day stepping then looks at her Apple Watch—which was totally full of sh*t.

It said she’d only gotten 15,000 steps. And that’s because her wrist was mostly stationary and typing, so it couldn’t log the steps.

So she got a hip-based pedometer. Thank you, Amazon Prime.

That allowed her to know her step count for the challenge.

We’ve also covered on Two Percent how hip-based pedometers are generally more accurate than wrist-based ones.

• More on that topic in this post: How Accurate is Your Fitness Tracker? (the post also explains how wrong six different wrist-based pedometer brands are).

4. Find someone who pushes you

Here was the thing about this step challenge: Leah had stiff competition.

She has a Florida-based coworker who is wired to move.

• This lady gets up at 5am to exercise.

• Her lunch is laps in her pool.

• Running is her pre-dinner ritual.

They’re good friends and have developed a hilarious rivalry—the corporate step challenge equivalent of Ali vs. Frazier, Duke vs. North Carolina, or the Yankees and Red Sox.

Leah said, “I’d text my coworker at the end of the day and say, ‘at 7pm my time, it’ll be 10pm your time. You’ll be going to bed in Florida. But me? I’ll be out taking a walk—getting more, and more, and more steps than you.”

Then her coworker would reply with, “Well, at 2am your time, you’ll be asleep. I hope you’ll be dreaming of me working out at 5am—and your dream will be a reality.”

5. Wear good shoes

Leah started her journey into the heart of step count darkness wearing a pair of random running shoes she had lying around.

That worked until it didn’t. Her feet ended up looking like she was part of Napoleon’s Russia campaign.

So she searched for some other shoes and discovered the ON Cloud 5. Her foot problems went away².

When I spoke with the wise Kyler Brown of WellSport and 10Squared for this post on bulletproofing your ankles, he gave me excellent advice about shoes:

When my clients find a shoe they love and that really works for them, I tell them to buy five pairs. Manufacturers are constantly updating their shoes and chances are the shoes you love will be different in a year.

Which is why Leah just ordered more pairs of the ON Cloud 5. Hoard.

• Read how to find the right exercise shoe here.

6. Wear a weighted pack if you want

My friend Jeff Byers, CEO of Two Percent Partner Momentous Nutrition, also uses a treadmill desk.

He used it heavily as we were training for our 50-mile ruck in Normandy. A month before our ruck, he texted me the following:

“I’m ripping 10 to 20 miles a day on my treadmill desk with 20, 30, or 45 pounds in the ruck.”

Keep in mind that Jeff is a freak physical specimen who played football in the NFL. But you, too, can add a weighted pack to your treadmill desk walks.

If you don’t have a treadmill desk, wearing a weighted pack around the house as you do chores gets you more benefits from every movement you do.

Or you can just make a normal treadmill workout even more effective by wearing a weighted pack.

7. Work well

I’ve considered getting a treadmill desk.

But here’s the thing: my writing takes a lot of focus. When I’m deep in a project, I’ll usually sit instead of stand, because sitting lets me direct all of my mental energy to the words.

I asked Leah if she changes the speed for different tasks.

“Psshht, no,” she said. “I max it. It’s always maxed out.” New nickname: Leah Always Maxed Out Easter.

The only time she doesn’t run the treadmill is when she has an on-camera meeting where she has to present.

I also asked Jeff Byers the same question. He had a more nuanced approach. His answer:

• “Zoom calls: 3.2 MPH is the max. I really like this because multitasking, getting distracted, and clicking around on the screen during the meeting at this speed is impossible. It keeps me very present just like in person, which I like.

• For writing basic emails and messaging: I go about 2mph.

• For deeper work like detailed spreadsheets, creating decks, and really considered emails, I just stand and have it as zero MPH.”

8. Get a good treadmill desk—and understand its limitations

Treadmill desks are not normal treadmills. They’re lower profile and designed to slide under a standup desk.

Leah bought this one. It’s the same one Jeff from Momentous uses. A few other friends who use treadmill desks also use that one.

It’s relatively inexpensive ($279). It works well for Leah and Jeff (who is a giant human), which suggests it’ll work well for you.

“Just realize you can only really walk on this treadmill at work,” Leah said. “It’s not designed for running and it doesn’t even work that well if you want to go for a serious walk—but I just go outside and walk for that.”

Have fun, don’t die, AMA about being the lazy one in the Easter family.

-Michael

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1. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of what MVPA is for you, read this paper.

2. I’ll also say here that Leah walked quite a bit outdoors before this—perhaps 10,000 steps a day. So she didn’t have any issues ramping up to 30,000. But if you’re starting from being inactive, probably ease into the treadmill desk.