WALKING THE TALK
We’re not quite there yet, but our PED (Assistant Podométre) will soon be available in French in addition to English, and thousands more Canadians will be virtually walking around the country. We have signed a contract with a major National company to develop and monitor a walking program to which all their employees will have access. Once the program is launched, we’ll provide more details. The benefit of walking is that it is accessible to a huge percentage of the workforce, unlike facility-based programs.The Counter Culture We take real pleasure from seeing the growth of acceptance of the pedometer as a motivational and recording device, and each sale has its own story. We have sent hundreds to Whitehorse in the Yukon where the Recreation and Parks Association have created a number of walking goals for local residents. If people can walk in the frozen North, they should be able to walk anywhere. We enjoy seeing how creative some teachers are in getting children to increase their step count and have seen million-step programs, Circle Canada initiatives and even fund-raisers with people paying so much per thousand steps. In February, we sent 7 school sets to The Pas in Manitoba. We’ve got our Provincial Government on the move with hundreds of  pedometers going to different Ministries, but so far we’ve been unable to penetrate the bastions of the Federal Government. It always feels like our pedometers are going to good homes when we get requests from the Heart and Stroke Foundation, Canadian Cancer Society and local groups dealing with Diabetes and MS, because walking can be such a big part of prevention, control and sometimes cure.  Recently we sent 600 pedometers to the Vancouver Island Health Authority and another 500 to Cornell University. Our ‘little black boxes’ have gone out to banks, churches and even a tire company. For orders of 1000 or more we are now able to customize our H215 pedometer with the logo of your company or organization at a very small cost. If you need further proof of the value of walking, two new studies have been released showing that regular walking not only adds years to your life, but also adds quality to the extra years. Dr. O. H. Franco used data from the famous Framingham Heart Study to show that the longer and further you walked, the longer and better you would live. Similar findings were shown in a study by M. Perri et al in the Archives of Internal Medicine. In commenting on the two studies my old friend, Stephen Blair of the Cooper Institute, concluded, “The bottom line is that 30 minutes of walking on 5 to 7 days a week provides substantial health benefits.” Another summary of the two studies quoted in the Associated Press said, “People who exercise regularly can add 3 years to their life and their hearts reap the benefits from a brisk walk of half an hour a day.” Faster walking also helps lower cholesterol levels. Celebrity personal trainer, Harley Pasternak, whose clients include Halle Berry, Alicia Keys and Orlando Bloom, is yet another proponent of walking. He advocates small changes to life’s routine that can end up making a difference: getting off the subway one stop earlier, parking in the furthest spot from the mall entrance and taking the stairs instead of the elevator. "You want to make (fitness) a lifestyle as opposed to this intense mission," said the Toronto native, who now has a team of trainers in New York and Los Angeles.
I was delighted to see that Dr. Ruth Collins-Nakai, president of the Canadian Medical Association, put her organization firmly in the corner of walking 10,000 steps a day. “"The average Canadian should be getting 10,000 steps a day," she said in a recent interview from her office in Edmonton, adding that strength, flexibility and aerobic training are all necessary to get fit. She said that if Canadians wore a pedometer, they'd see just how inactive they are. Those who want to lose weight should be taking more than 10,000 steps a day, she said. No wonder our Omron HJ-105 and Speakwell H-215 pedometers are flying off the shelves. |
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