stumpski
Well-known member
I do a fair bit of walking on my days off, and I bought a pedometer recently as I was curious to know how many miles/steps I cover on my regular routes (also, because I'm on my feet all day at work, I wanted to know what distance I cover in a typical day). So I get this thing, and the first thing you have to do is set a stride length. The stride settings go from 12 inches to 84 inches - I realise that when running you obviously take a longer stride, but who has one of seven feet - the Jolly Green Giant? I settled on 30 inches and off I set. A straightforward walk to the next village took me around 50 minutes, which the ped insisted was exactly one mile. Sceptical of this information, I checked the step counter. I worked out that if that was correct each step would have taken six seconds - I was not walking in slow motion. And when I decided to do a spot test, and paced out 100 steps, I noted that the ped had only recorded 43 of them. But if I ran the same distance, most or all steps were registered.
It seems to me this is so inaccurate that I may as well just calculate the distance on a basis of time taken (around 3 mph I think, as a walk in the country is a stroll rather than a march), but can I do anything to improve the accuracy? When I shortened the stride setting it was even further out, so do I have to reset it to four feet or something? Anyone who's used one of these things, please advise.
It seems to me this is so inaccurate that I may as well just calculate the distance on a basis of time taken (around 3 mph I think, as a walk in the country is a stroll rather than a march), but can I do anything to improve the accuracy? When I shortened the stride setting it was even further out, so do I have to reset it to four feet or something? Anyone who's used one of these things, please advise.
