The Power of Move: Every Step Counts

When I ask people what is holding them back from becoming more active, the number one reason is, and has always been, “not enough time.”

With our busy schedules, it’s understandable that movement is not always top of mind. But when you want to be on top of your game, it is important to be physically active throughout your day, rather than thinking of movement only as something you do during a workout in your free time, before or after work.

As soon as you start moving, your nervous system becomes more activated. Adrenaline and noradrenaline increase alertness, while heart rate and blood flow increase, helping mobilize energy for immediate use. Even a short period of movement can influence your mood and mental state, which is why a brisk walk can be particularly useful when you feel mentally slow, distracted, or stuck. Movement is not just something you do to stay fit; it is something you can use to change how you feel and perform while your day is happening.

More Energy to Perform

Physical activity improves your cardiovascular system and oxygen uptake, helps regulate blood sugar and metabolism, and influences a wide range of hormones and signalling molecules that are crucial for the functioning of your body and brain. It reduces the risk of many chronic diseases and can add healthy years to your life. 

But there is an important distinction between moving and exercising: every step counts, and you do not need to be in sports clothes or in a gym to benefit from movement. Simply getting up regularly and walking around can help interrupt prolonged sitting, while walking to a meeting, taking the stairs, getting up to make a coffee, or taking a short walk after lunch all add to your daily volume of movement.

Regular physical activity also improves your capacity to produce and use energy. Your muscles become better at using oxygen and producing ATP — the molecule your cells use as energy — while your cardiovascular system becomes more efficient at delivering oxygen and nutrients where they are needed. In simple terms, regular movement and exercise make the machinery that produces and delivers energy more capable. This is why exercise can make you feel more energetic even when you are not exercising — which, for most people, is more than 90 percent of the time.

Move to Feel Better

Movement doesn’t just train your body; it also changes the environment in which your brain operates. Physical activity influences cerebral blood flow and activates a range of neurobiological pathways involved in brain function, and research increasingly shows that even brief bouts of activity can have acute effects on aspects of cognitive function, including attention, executive function, memory and information processing.

But you don’t always need to think about movement in terms of cognitive performance. Sometimes the most immediate benefit is simply that you feel better. A short walk can change your mood, getting up and moving can make you feel more awake, and a few minutes outside can give you a mental break from whatever you have been doing. When you feel more energetic, less fatigued and more positive, you are more likely to engage with whatever comes next. Movement is therefore not just something you do to stay fit; it is something you can use to change how you feel and perform while your day is happening.

Don’t Just Exercise. Move Throughout the Day.

The power of movement ultimately comes from its cumulative effect. A short walk can change how you feel right now, regular exercise can improve your sleep, mood, glucose regulation and ability to handle stress, and consistent physical activity can improve cardiovascular fitness, preserve muscle and support the health of your brain. But there is one important catch: you have to keep moving.

The body and brain adapt to the demands you place on them — and to the absence of those demands. That is why movement is not something you add to life when you have time; it is part of how you maintain the capacity to live, think and perform well. This is particularly important during the working day, when modern work has made it possible to do almost everything without moving. Meetings can take place without walking anywhere, messages replace conversations across the office, coffee can be delivered to your desk, and once you sit down, there is very little forcing you to get back up.

The result is that many of us spend hours sitting almost completely still, precisely at the time when we are asking our brains to perform at their best.

This is where the timing of movement becomes important. Movement doesn’t only create long-term adaptations; even brief bouts of activity can produce short-term changes in how we feel and function. Research on so-called “exercise snacks” — short bouts of activity distributed throughout the day — suggests that these small doses can contribute to fitness over time, while research on breaking up prolonged sitting suggests that brief activity breaks can also produce modest acute benefits for aspects of cognitive function.

You don’t always have to wait for a workout to make movement work for you. A few minutes of movement can be a useful way to change your state during the day, particularly when you notice your energy or concentration beginning to fade. A short walk may help you feel more alert and less fatigued, while a few minutes of more vigorous movement can create a stronger physiological stimulus when time is scarce. The goal is not to turn every break into a workout, but to recognize that movement can be used deliberately throughout the day.

How Much Movement Do You Need?

The Move Standard provides a useful foundation for health and fitness, but it should be seen as a baseline rather than a personal prescription. How much movement you need depends on your fitness level, lifestyle, work environment, goals and the way you deal with stress. During some periods of your life, the baseline may be enough; during others, you may benefit from considerably more.

More importantly, the Move Standard does not tell you how often you should move during the working day. There is a difference between building your physical capacity and managing your state. You can exercise regularly before or after work and still spend most of the day sitting. Your workout remains valuable, but it does not mean that your body no longer benefits from getting up and moving throughout the day. This is where the opportunity lies for most of us: not necessarily in finding another hour to exercise, but in finding more opportunities to move during the hours we already have.

The Power of Small Changes

If you want to become more active, it pays to start where you are rather than where you think you should be. You don’t have to transform your lifestyle overnight. A few hundred additional steps, a short walk after lunch, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, or getting up regularly during the working day may seem insignificant on their own, but repeated day after day, these small changes add up.

This is the power of marginal gains. Instead of deciding to suddenly become “an active person,” make one small change that you can actually repeat. Once that becomes part of your routine, build on it. The goal is not to set the most ambitious target, but to create a behaviour that you can sustain, because consistency is ultimately what turns movement into a meaningful contribution to your health and energy.

Make It Part of the Way You Work

Knowing that movement is good for you is not enough; you need to make it easy to do. This is where BJ Fogg’s Behaviour Model provides a useful framework: find a reason, make it easier, and nudge yourself.

First, find a reason to move. Rethink the power of investing a few minutes of your time in movement. You are not necessarily taking time away from your work; you are investing in the energy, mood and capacity you need to do it well. Once you see movement as something that can help you perform rather than something that competes with your work, it becomes much easier to find opportunities for it during the day.

Then make it easier by building movement into the way you already work. Put a short walk in your calendar, arrange to walk with somebody else, or create simple opportunities to get up and move between meetings. 

Finally, nudge yourself by connecting movement to things that already happen during your day. Treat yourself to the best coffee by walking to the coffee place further away rather than the machine next to your desk; go out for lunch together and make a walking lunch with colleagues part of your routine; or plan meetings further away from your desk, preferably on another floor, so you have a reason to walk there and back. You can do the same with phone calls and conversations: instead of answering the next call from your chair, get up and walk, or walk over to a colleague rather than sending a message.

There are plenty of other opportunities: take the stairs instead of the elevator, get up between meetings rather than moving directly from one chair to another, take the longer route to your next destination, or use an alarm or another reminder to interrupt prolonged sitting. If you spend most of your working day behind a desk, these small choices can add up to a meaningful amount of additional movement without requiring another hour in your schedule.

You are not adding exercise to your day. You are changing the way you move through the day. The less effort it takes to start moving, the less you need to rely on motivation in the moment. A well-designed environment can make the behaviour you want easier to repeat.

Boost your ROI

Walking is the easiest place to start, and every step adds movement. But when you have very little time and want a stronger physiological stimulus, you can increase the intensity by moving against gravity: take the stairs, get up repeatedly from a chair, or perform body-weight squats. Using the biggest muscles in your body increases the metabolic demand, while adding speed increases the intensity further.

You can think of movement as three levels, each adding another way to increase the impact. 

• Level 1 is to move: walk, stand, or otherwise move horizontally to interrupt prolonged sitting. It is the easiest level to integrate into your day, and every step counts. 
• Level 2 is to activate: move against gravity and engage the large muscle groups in your body by taking the stairs, repeatedly getting up from a chair, or doing body-weight squats. This creates a stronger physiological stimulus in less time. 
• Level 3 is to accelerate: increase the speed and power of the movement, if your fitness and technique allow it. Walk at a faster pace, climb the stairs more quickly, or make your squats more dynamic; the same movement performed faster creates a substantially stronger stimulus in a short period of time.

Most of your movement can and should simply be movement. But when you have very little time and want to create more impact, put your heart into it.

Keep Moving

The power of movement ultimately comes from its cumulative effect. You don’t need one big block of exercise to make a difference; you can accumulate movement throughout the day, one small decision at a time. A walk to a meeting, a flight of stairs, a trip to the coffee machine, a conversation with a colleague, a short walk between meetings — each one adds to the total. And this is why every step counts.

Taking the next step is also a useful way to think about staying a step ahead. You don’t need to know exactly where every step will take you; you simply need to keep moving in the right direction — for your energy, your health and your ability to perform at your best. And when we do that together, those individual steps become something much bigger.

Don’t wait until you have an hour to exercise, until the end of the day, or until you feel motivated. Start with the next step: walk to the next meeting, take the stairs, get your coffee somewhere a little further away, walk after lunch, or get up when your concentration begins to fade. Then take another step.

Because every step counts.