Every day this summer, you are presented with an application that has changed our lives or our habits. An app you may have used: a pedometer. She gives us her daily sentence: an app that counts our steps. A tool to encourage physical activity, necessary but not sufficient.
There are the simplest ones, which just tell you your number of steps, there are those which add some activity tips to warm you up. Even those that offer you to earn a few cents if you walk enough. Whatever they are, the main thing is that these apps encourage you to move.
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“It’s a help to move towards physical activity. But you shouldn’t say to yourself, I took 10,000 steps during the day and then it’s good”: a first step, therefore, as underlined by doctor Martin Ducret, assistant specialist in sports medicine at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris. Recording your daily steps is fine, counting between 5 and 7,000, but it’s only one element of the panoply of activities to be carried out to stay in shape.
“It really should be like brushing your teeth.”
Martin Ducret, physicianfranceinfo
“Steps calculate ‘cardiopulmonary activity’, so what we call cardio in the jargon. While there are four pillars normally to have a physical activity good for health, according to French recommendations. So it There’s cardio activity. The second thing is muscle building, it’s working the muscles. And when you’re just cycling or running, you’re not working all the muscles. So you have to do other exercises in addition. And there is also all that is work of mobility, that is to say of flexibility, so that the tendons are more flexible, that they stretch better, the muscles, the same. And the fourth pillar is balance. Because as we age, we lose our balance, our muscles are less strong, we are less and less flexible. And also, our cardiac activity is less good.”, explains the doctor.
All this, obviously, takes a bit of time, with the summer it may be easier, and for the rest of the year, you have to see it as a routine. “It really should be like brushing your teeth”, insists Martin Ducret. Because we no longer count the scientific studies that demonstrate the benefits of activity, on physical and psychological health, on sleep, on pain, knowing that everyone can practice, at their own pace, by doing need call a doctor.