If they get five minutes to smoke, you get five minutes to walk.

Nobody questions the four people who disappear downstairs every couple of hours. Go with them and walk round the block instead, and somehow that is the odd behaviour.

This one is argued rather than measured. It is what I do, why I think it works, and where I have checked myself against the research. There is no sources list at the bottom, because most of it is an opinion and it would be dishonest to dress it up as anything else.

Published 4 September 2026. An opinion piece, not medical or dietary advice.

I walked round my office ten times

Ten laps. Five hundred steps. It is not a big office, ten to fifteen people in the space, and I was not doing anything impressive. I was on the phone.

That is the whole insight and it is embarrassingly small. Five hundred steps is four per cent of a day at twelve and a half thousand. Do it three times and you have covered an eighth of the target without leaving the building or changing your clothes.

Your office is a different size and your laps will be worth a different number. That figure is one person, one office, one day, and I am reporting it rather than recommending it. Count your own lap once and you will know what yours is worth for the rest of your working life.

The furthest one, every time

The rule I use is stupid and it works: when there is a choice between the near one and the far one, take the far one. Every time, without deliberating, because the deliberation is what costs you.

• The far coffee machine. Not the one on your floor. And go back to your desk between making it and drinking it, rather than standing there waiting.
• The far water cooler. Refill more often and in smaller amounts. A bottle that holds less is a feature.
• The stairs, in both directions. Down as well as up. Down is the one people skip and it is the easy one.
• The far toilet, the far printer, the far exit. You are going anyway. The only decision is which door.
• Any call you can take standing. This is where the ten laps came from. Nobody on the other end knows.

None of these is exercise. That is the point. They cost no willpower, no kit and no time you were not already spending, and they are the only kind of activity that survives a bad week.

The smoke break

Here is the one I actually feel strongly about.

In most offices there is a group who go outside several times a day for five or ten minutes. It is understood. Nobody schedules around it, nobody resents it, and nobody asks them to make the time up. It is simply a thing that happens.

So go with them. Walk round the block while they stand there. You get the same five minutes, the same air and the same break from the screen, and you come back having done something instead of something else.

I am not being smug about smoking. The point is about permission. Everybody already agrees that five minutes away from the desk is reasonable. The permission exists. It just tends to get claimed by the people with a reason that looks like a habit rather than a choice.

And yes, someone will ask what you are doing. In my experience they ask once, they find it funny for about a week, and then it becomes the thing you do. The awkwardness has a short half-life and the steps do not.

What it probably does for the working day

I would like to tell you that walking between meetings makes you sharper. The honest version is more modest.

A 2026 meta-analysis pooled 22 randomised crossover trials with 418 people, comparing uninterrupted sitting against sitting broken up with activity. It found a small improvement in executive function, with a standardised effect of 0.13, and a slightly larger one for working memory at 0.17. The authors describe the certainty of that evidence as low.

So: a real effect, a small one, measured immediately afterwards, and the people who found it are hedging. I would not restructure your day around a Hedges’ g of 0.13. I mention it because it points the same way as the thing you can feel, and because the alternative was to claim something bigger than the evidence supports.

Mornings, and what changes when there are children

Getting up half an hour earlier and walking round the block is the cleanest version of all of this. It happens before anything can go wrong with the day, and by nine in the morning it is already banked.

If you have small children at home, that plan quietly assumes somebody else is awake. Often nobody is, and leaving the house is not a thing you can do. This is where most advice of this kind stops being written for you.

The honest answer is that the walk has to come indoors. A walking pad under a desk, or in front of whatever you were going to watch anyway, is the version that survives a house with a baby in it. It is not as good as being outside and it is enormously better than the walk you did not take. The morning routine has its own page, including the part of it that quietly disappears when you take your phone in with you.

Steps before the gym, kept boring

I walk before I lift. Twenty minutes on a treadmill at a speed I could hold a conversation at, and nothing more than that.

The temptation is to make it a session. Do not. The job of that twenty minutes is to get you warm and get the number up, not to take anything out of the lifting you came to do. If it leaves you breathing hard you have turned your warm-up into a workout and charged it to the wrong account.

One thing worth knowing before you add walking on top of an existing plan: the deficit you set is rarely the deficit you end up running once training sits on top of it. More movement has a cost, and if the scale starts falling faster than you meant it to, the answer is usually to eat more rather than to walk less.

Why 12,500 and not 10,000

I aim for 12,500. I have said out loud, more than once, that 10,000 is basically sedentary. I was wrong about that and it is worth correcting properly, because the correction comes from the same paper the 12,500 comes from.

Tudor-Locke and Bassett proposed a set of step-count bands in Sports Medicine in 2004. Their words: 10,000 steps a day “indicates the point that should be used to classify individuals as active”, and people above 12,500 are “likely to be classified as highly active”. Sedentary is the bottom band of that same scale, a long way below either.

So 10,000 is not sedentary. It is the line for active. 12,500 is the line for highly active, and that is the honest reason to aim at it: not because the lower number is nothing, but because the higher one is a different band.

There is a second reason I keep the target high, and it is behavioural rather than physiological. A target of 10,000 that I hit at eleven at night is a target I spend the evening negotiating with. A target of 12,500 means the days I fall short still land above 10,000. Aiming past the thing is how I stop myself bargaining.

Two honest caveats, both of which cut against me. The research page on step counts reports that the steepest gains sit at the bottom of the range, and that going from 3,000 to 5,000 appears to matter considerably more than going from 8,000 to 10,000. Nothing I have read suggests the jump from 10,000 to 12,500 buys anything like as much as the first few thousand did. And walking moves the scale much less than the arithmetic promises, for reasons that page covers.

I still aim for 12,500. I just do it knowing it is a preference about how I want to spend my day rather than a finding about how bodies work.

The three of them are the same project

The reason I bother with any of this is not the step count. It is that the gym, the job and the house are not three separate lives being traded off against each other, even though the calendar insists they are.

Walking at lunchtime is the one that makes this obvious. It is simultaneously the training, the break from work, and the reason I have something left at six o’clock. One activity, three accounts, and nothing had to be sacrificed to pay for it.

That is also the argument I would make to anyone who thinks they have no time. You probably do not have a spare hour. You almost certainly have five minutes, six or seven times, already sitting in the day as coffee, stairs, phone calls and the walk to the far door. It is the same five minutes the smokers have been taking all along.

And on the days none of it happens, the other opinion piece on this site is about going and doing the smallest possible version anyway.

More in this series: where 10,000 steps came from, weigh daily and believe the weekly average, and the morning routine.

This is an opinion piece, argued from experience rather than measured, and it carries no sources list for that reason. The two studies named in it are linked where they appear. It is not medical or dietary advice. If you have a medical condition, are pregnant, or have any history of disordered eating or compulsive exercise, speak to a qualified professional before setting yourself an activity target.