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If you’re anything like me, you’ll constantly be tracking your step count.
I’ll often skip the bus in the morning to walk 25 minutes to the station, and I’ve been known to walk circles around my flat at 11:59pm in order to hit that all-important 10,000 (a completely arbitrary figure, by the way).
Often, I find reaching my goal difficult, because I work in an office. I’m sat, glued to my computer, for hours on end, only getting up to use the loo or make a cuppa.
If I’m stuck in hyperfocus mode — common for me as I have ADHD — I find it difficult to step away from my desk, for fear of breaking the spell.
And it’s not just me. One 2019 YouGov study found almost half (45%) of UK adults are sedentary for at least six hours each day, while 46% of working adults walk for less than an hour each working day.
So when I read about the ‘trigger point’ method, that could help you reach your step count without even realising it, I was intrigued — and decided to give it a go.
The one thing that helped me get my step count up in the office
‘Trigger points’ gamify your step count. The concept, developed by Vitality’s Habit Index, involves picking various ‘bases’ in your office — like the coffee machine, the printer, or the stationery cupboard — and using that as a prompt to walk around a bit.
It’s not about setting off on a 10 minute stroll every time you see the water cooler, but rather adding in a quick lap of the kitchen, for example.
I picked the kettle as my base. So, every time I saw it, I did a loop around the office. If I wasn’t particularly busy, I’d throw in a walk to a different floor in the building, and back up again.
Effectively, I turned myself into a human version of Pac-Man, and just hoped my colleagues didn’t think I’d lost the plot walking around in circles.
When I started this experiment in the morning, my step count was around 3,000, but I was feeling lethargic, reaching for my coffee with a yawn.
By lunchtime, I was surprised to see I’d got myself up to 4,000, just by putting in a bit of extra graft.
On average, adults walk around 100 steps per minute, which means taking five minutes away equates to an extra 500 steps. If you do this routine a four times, you can add an extra 2,000 steps.
While I’d previously struggled to get up from my desk for fear of destroying the hyperfocus, this actually helped to reinforce it. By lunchtime, I felt more refreshed, more alert, and more productive.
One 2026 study from Harvard University found that getting a few extra steps in can help improve focus, memory, and thinking skills, which is welcome news if you’re struggling to get into the flow of it in the office.
The experiment taught me that you don’t always need to head to your local park for hours after work, even if it’s arguably nicer to walk past flower beds over photocopiers.
If you’re time poor, this trigger point technique is a great solution.
How long you need to walk for every day to ‘reduce risk of early death’
A 2026 study, conducted by the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences and published in The Lancet, estimates that walking for just five minutes per day could help reduce the risk of early death by 10% for most of the general population, while walking for 10 minutes could cut the risk by 15%.
But this figure is different for the ‘least active’ people among us, as for them, a five-minute walk could reduce the risk by just 6%.
If you aren’t able to get out and about for a brisk walk, simply getting up and moving about your home, doing housework, for instance, could also make a difference.
The findings also claimed that reducing the amount of time you are sedentary (sitting and inactive) by 30 minutes each day could help to prevent around 4.5% of deaths.
As for step counts, the world we’re hung up on reaching 10,000 per day, but this was actually a marketing technique. The Japanese character for 10,000 (which is 万) looks like someone going for a walk, so was chosen to advertise a pedometer.
However, it’s since been debunked as a gold standard that’s a bit of a myth, as adults aged between 18 and 59 can generally aim for anywhere between 8,000 and 10,000.
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