Monday Challenge!

Alright folks, it's time for the first real challenge of sorts in the Pedometer Challenge! You may be wondering if there's any sort of guidelines as to how many steps are recommended to hit each day depending on your activity level. As a matter of fact there are! Here are the general guidelines that I picked up from Active Living:

* Under 5,000 steps/day, you are not getting enough physical activity.
* 5,000 - 7,499 steps/day is "average" for most people but is not enough to provide all the health benefits of walking.
* 7,500 - 9,999 steps/day is moving in the right direction and would put you in the “somewhat active” category.
* 10,000 or more steps/day is a good target and puts you in the “active” category.
* More than 12,500 steps/day puts you in the "highly active" category and ensures you are attaining many heath benefits.

I've seen different step quantity break downs, but I think these guidelines kind of give you an idea of what to strive for to reap the benefits of healthy activity. I also like the site because I think it has plenty of helpful pointers. Granted it's a Canadian site, and I'm in the US, but I thinks it's a great site regardless. And the aim of the site is to get people out and more active. Hence why their step counts fall where they do.

The challenge this week is for everyone to figure out where they want to fit in on this scale and set a goal for your minimum number of steps that you want to hit each day. My daily step goal is 10,000 for now. Obviously I had a little harder time hitting it this past weekend, but that gives me something to work towards. And I have no idea how this week is going to go. I should theoretically get in plenty of steps, but we also do a fair amount of standing around at shows which seems to wear me out a bit more. We'll see. I'm going to shoot for hitting at least 10,000 steps every single day this week! What are your step goals for the week?

My step count for yesterday was 11,788 and that's because I made sure that I hit it by lengthening the walks that I took the dogs on! I'm also THRILLED to say that I finally have Heffner back on just a regular collar for our walks instead of the gentle leader. Now that he gets two walks a day and longer ones, he's settled into a groove and isn't hell bent on taking ME for a walk! Our walks are back to being the pleasure that they were before.:o)

And I'm sooooooooooo looking forward to the Rose City Classic this week!! I'm really excited to see my extended dog show family!! It's such a neat group of people with great dogs. And it's been about a month and a half since our last show, so I feel like I haven't seen a lot of these people in forever.:)