I love to set myself challenges. In the past, I've set out to find out what happens when you eat garlic every day, or use an ab roller every day for a month. My lifestyle, very active in summer, had become decidedly sedentary over the holidays. As 2025 rolled around, I decided to boost my daily step count, which had settled at 5,000, back up to the well-known 10,000 steps goal.
I decided that trying to double my daily step count in a week was probably a bit ambitious, so I asked Milica McDowell, a doctor of physical therapy, exercise physiologist, and VP of operations for Gait Happens, how to best go from 5,000 to 8,000 in a week. With great concern, McDowell told me that under no circumstances should I do that and that such a jump would put my body under undue stress.
