Jacob Sager Weinstein

If your building has multiple floors, get in the habit of pushing the button in the elevator for one floor below where you actually want to go and walk up that last flight of steps.

It still counts.

Even if you're not in the gym in your sports clothes, that's physical activity that is good for your body.

And I think sometimes there's certain myths that get in our way.

So there's this idea that, for example, you have to do 10,000 steps a day, that that's the magic number to be healthy.

And if you look into where that number came from, it was actually made up by a Japanese company that was trying to sell pedometers, those things that measure how far you walk.

And it wasn't really based on any science.

When they've actually done real studies of this, they found that

going up to about 4,400 steps a day has a big jump in your life expectancy.

And if you keep going past that, if you go up to about 7,500 steps, that gets better for you with every step.

But once you actually hit that 7,500 steps, it doesn't hurt you to keep walking.

But there's not really any gains they've seen in life expectancy beyond that.

And even more broadly, what they've often found is that there's diminishing returns with almost any exercise you do, which means that the most benefits you get are when you start doing it.

So if you walk up

Two flights of steps, that's better than one.

But if you walk up one flight of steps, you've still gotten most of the benefits or a good chunk of those benefits just from that one flight.

And most importantly, you've gotten more exercise than you would have if you had walked up zero flights of steps.

And if you can stick with one flight a day, that's great.

If you can add an extra flight once a week or once a month, then over the course of the year, that really adds up.

If you can just do a little bit healthier stuff today than you did last week, that really adds up.