SHAPE UP
Counting steps with a pedometer seems to really encourage fitness

By Charles Stuart Platkin

Pedometers can be off by up to 15 percent. The Accusplit Eagle is a Japanese model that is among the most accurate. Advertiser library photo • March 4, 2003

Starting in summer, for just $5, you can get a salad, a water bottle, and a pedometer.

Pedometers gained popularity with the promotion of the 10,000 Steps goal for daily walking, an idea born 40 years ago in Japan. The Japanese named their pedometers manpo-kei, literally meaning "10,000 steps meter." The idea was to make it easy for individuals to increase their activity without thinking too much. All they need is a simple pedometer.

A pedometer's basic function is to count steps. Pedometers contain an internal lever that is triggered with your hip movements, counting each one as a step.

Most of the time, your pedometer will be counting your actual steps, but other movements can cause the lever to go up and down.

Recent studies show people who use pedometers generally stay with their exercise program longer.

Not only that, in a study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a program of diet plus lifestyle activity was shown to offer similar health benefits and be a "suitable alternative to diet plus vigorous activity for overweight individuals."

Participants in the "lifestyle" program simply increased the levels of physical activity by about 30 minutes, five days a week, and lost weight. Participants were taught to incorporate short bouts of activity using pedometers into their daily schedules.

"The average person accumulates 3,000 to 5,000 steps per day," says David Bassett Jr., professor of health and exercise science at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. The goal is to increase your steps per day to about 10,000.

My advice: Take it slowly, first doing a test with the pedometer for a week to evaluate your current number of steps. Try to increase your steps about 20 percent a month — while ensuring your changes are sustainable.

However, "pedometers can be off by as much as 40 percent," says Bassett. In his most recent study in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, he rated the top pedometers for accuracy and reliability. In another study, Catrine Tudor-Locke, professor of health promotion at Arizona State University, found a difference as large as 1,800 steps, about a mile, between two pedometers measured over one day.

According to Bassett, Japan is one of the few countries that manufacture accurate pedometers. Japan actually has industry standards for pedometer production and its pedometers typically are accurate within 3 percent.

There are only a few models available in the United States that meet these standards, and they are imported from Japan. One is distributed by a company called New Lifestyles. It sells one of the best pedometers on the market, the Digi-Walker SW-200, which retails for about $22 (www.digiwalker.com). The other company is Accusplit (www.accusplit.com), which only has some models that are made in Japan (e.g., the AE120) — the others (made in Taiwan and China) can be off by as much as 15 percent.

The pedometer made for the national public health program America on the Move (the AX120) is produced in China and isn't nearly as accurate as the Japanese ones.

I did an informal test with a few of these devices by walking 2.75 miles. Here are the results:

• GPS Garmin Frontrunner: 2.75 miles.
• McDonald's Step With It pedometer: 3.0 miles.
• Digi-Walker SW-200: 2.75 miles.
• Accusplit (AX120): 2.6 miles.

If you own a pedometer that is not 100 percent accurate, that doesn't mean you have to throw yours out and buy a new one. It simply means your pedometer may be overestimating or underestimating your actual steps.

To account for that, take more or fewer steps.