All that walking you do at work does not count as aerobic exercise; stop kidding yourself and learn why you need to do “real” cardio despite aching feet after work.
Aching feet at the end of the workday does not equate to having done a sufficient degree of cardiovascular exercise. Your feet ache; get new shoes.
If your legs are aching after a full day of work, this indicates that you’re not as physically fit as you think you are.
Though aching legs can mean a medical condition involving veins, a deconditioned but otherwise healthy person will often suffer from aching legs after doing a lot of walking at the workplace.
If you’re a medical professional, teacher, maintenance worker, maid/custodian, server, retail employee or in some other line of work that requires you to constantly be walking from point A to point B, you absolutely still need to set time aside, at least twice a week, for structured aerobic activity.
We don’t need to get scientific about this.
We can get anecdotal.
Let’s suppose that your only “exercise” is all the walking you do on the job. And that’s it.
- You don’t do athletics.
- You don’t dance, take fitness classes or do anything else BUT the walking at the workplace.
Then one day you decide to jog for 10 minutes nonstop in your neighborhood. Go ahead, try it. See what happens.
You will feel miserable, especially if you’re overweight.
Here’s another test: Find a long, long hill and briskly walk it. Keep moving, briskly.
What happens? Feels awful, right?
- Jump rope. How long can you go?
- Can you run up a hill?
- Can you run from one end of your street to the other?
- Try hiking. How long before you’re exhausted and need to stop for a rest?
- Can you run across a field of grass or must you stop after just 20 seconds due to breathlessness?
- Can you run up several flights of stairs without stopping?
- Can you even WALK them without feeling beaten down?
Does your heart rate even get elevated while on the job? If hurrying down a corridor drives up your heart rate, this is indicative of poor physical conditioning, not a great workout.
A person in fine shape will not notice an elevated heart rate or get winded upon hurrying down a corridor to make a meeting.
Being on your feet all day at the workplace, doing a ton of walking, does nothing to strengthen the cardiac muscle — unless you’re somehow able to insert periods of very brisk walking, and I mean brisk.
But this is not likely if you’re a server, due to limited space and opportunities.
A medical professional may be able to find opportunities to take 4 mph stints down long corridors. Same with a maintenance worker at that hospital.
But let’s face it: You’d still be limited to just episodic, very brief periods of only 4 mph movement, and even if it was jogging, it’d be too brief to have any marked impact on cardiovascular conditioning.
In other articles I’ve written, I’ve preached the virtues of very brief episodes of movement — but when done intensely, such as a SPRINT down that corridor, or 30 seconds of squat jumps.
But a fast walk? A trot? One minute here and there is marginal towards heart health.
You cannot compare walking all day on the job to, say, 30 minutes of hiking uphill, or time spent in a step aerobics class, or 30 minutes of jogging nonstop.
The walking you do at work is in the name of carrying out your job duties.
Exercise, for heart health, should have an entirely different time slot in your day, reserved just for that.
Lorra Garrick is a former personal trainer certified through the American Council on Exercise. At Bally Total Fitness she trained women and men of all ages for fat loss, muscle building, fitness and improved health.
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