Counting the Steps

One of the things I would like to accomplish in the month of September is to better understand my fitness devices. I currently use a Garmin Fēnix 3 HR and an Ōura ring to keep up with various fitness activities or just the mundane walking that I engage in on a daily basis. As part of this understanding, I want to start using them more, thus I need to exercise.

Of course, I don’t just want to figure out what my devices are telling me, but I want to see how they can help me get in better shape, so I’ll have to research how the metrics relate to my reality and how – hopefully – I am improving my fitness. To this end, I’m gonna start with the steps I’ve been walking.

When I look at my Garmin Connect app, I can see that I took 12,033 steps yesterday, and that was the most I’ve accomplished this week. Back during Comic-Con, I reached my highest level of steps – 19,830 – but of course that was not a normal occurrence. The good thing, I think, is that I surpassed my goal of 8,587 steps a day.

Now, I’m not really sure how I got that goal, but after a bit of digging in the Garmin Connect app, I found that under user settings for my Fēnix I can set the number of Daily Steps. I’ve got this set to Auto Goal which determined that 8,587 was my current goal. Here’s what Garmin has to say about the Auto Goal setting.

With that in mind, I suppose the 8,587 is pretty good, but I’ll have to try to get it up to 10k. Though I did a bit of research on the 10k step idea and found its not really a scientifically backed number, just a bit of marketing from when Japan started the first pedometer craze.

But I kinda like the idea that the number will fluctuate and increase as I become more active so my goal is to move it in the right direction.