Step it out Bro

My ActivPal data have come back as two PDF files for six 24 hour days of information. This shows that, as expected, I am a sofa bloke. Activity codes for the Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Mon chart [L] Sleep Walk Stand Drive  Sit . I am for sure not clocking up the 8 hours of sleep required by St Matthew of Walker. I'm not pathological like Margaret "Bonkers" Thatcher or General Petraeus on 4 hours per night but my range is 6.5 - 7.3 hr/night with a couple of trips to the tinkle. My MET-hours are also reasonably consistent in the mid-30s per day. METs are calibrated at

1. sleep
2. gardening
3. brisk walk
4. wood-chopping 
5. brisk cycling
6. shovelling snow
7. running

In an 18 hour awake day on average I am just fossicking around - sitting, making tea, bloggin' . . . a bit less than 2 hrs a day actually walking during the working week [We Th Fr top three circles] ; a bit more than 2 hrs a day walking at the weekend [Sa Su Mo lower three circles]. The ActivPal manages to differentiate between driving and just sitting and I can independently verify that I spend 90 minutes in the car, and a huge cloud of carbon footprint, every working day. That's 'unavoidable' given that I choose to live 40 km from work in a region without buses. But ,virtue alert> I typically don't drive anywhere on Sat and Sun: not to the gym, the mall, the pub, the feed-store or visiting. The details are quite revealing, so we should resist letting The Man fix these to us as a time-keeping device:

This is Thursday when I have two Human Physiology lectures 9-10, 10-11 and then white-diary for the rest of the day. The trace reveals that a) I pace about waving my arms while talking about the pancreas [true dat] b) I was outta there by 1 o'clock after I'd spent another 2 hours at my desk shuffling papers. When I got home at 2pm, I was reasonably active although I cannot remember what I actually did. A bit of light wood-chopping, maybe?

I boast about being welded to my sofa and the poster child for the sedentary life-style but the bottom left corner of each day from the summarry chart records MET.hrs at 30-35 per day. That clocks up at 12-15 Met.mins per week and this resource claims that good things start to happen if you can get over 4,000 Met.m per week. Does this mean that my loaf-epaulettes will be ripped off my shoulders, my TV remote will be broken in half and I will be ignominiously drummed out of the Corps de Pommes de Terre de Fauteuil?  The problem is that my ActivPal PDF reports, for all [the gizmo ticks every 15 seconds] that data, it is really just an elaborate anecdote without a bench-mark or any replication. I'll talk to my pal Gary who can run a marathon and has a FitBit App on his watch.