No Walk Required
The best news in the whole research pile, for everyone whose body has notes: you don't have to walk. At all. A 2016 Diabetes Care study found that simple resistance moves, calf raises, half squats, sit-to-stands beside a desk, worked about as well as walking...
The episode, word for word
This episode is for the people who've been listening for five weeks with one eyebrow up. The ones going, "This is all lovely, Neil. Really. But my knees have opinions." Or your feet do. Or you use a chair to get around. Or your neighborhood has no sidewalks, or it's rained for nine straight days and you're not doing laps in a parking garage like you're in a sad country music video.
Today I get to hand you the best news in the entire research pile. You don't have to walk. At all. And I don't mean that as a consolation prize, people. I mean the science says it. On purpose. In a journal.
I'm Neil Greathouse, this is Your Best T1D Year.
Here's the study. 2016, Diabetes Care, a researcher named Paddy Dempsey. Adults with type 2 broke up their sitting every 30 minutes with one of two things. Light walking... or simple resistance moves, right where they stood. Calf raises. Half squats. Standing up and sitting back down. Nothing that requires a sidewalk, a good knee day, or even leaving the room.
Both worked. Hear me: the stand-in-place moves lowered post-meal glucose and insulin about as well as the walking did. About as WELL. The magic was never the walking, people. The walking was just the delivery truck. The magic is muscle contraction. Any muscle contraction. Remember the side door from September? Your muscles pulling sugar out of your blood, no insulin needed? The door doesn't care how you knocked. Ten slow sit-to-stands from a chair opens it. Seated leg lifts open it. A resistance band looped on a doorknob opens it. If a muscle did a thing, sugar moved. That's the whole rule.
And I want to say the quiet part here, because it matters to me. Every activity challenge on the internet accidentally tells a whole group of people, "oh, not you though." The bad knees. The chronic pain. The wheelchairs. The post-surgery crowd. The bodies that don't do 7,000 steps. People, not this one. Not this challenge. The chair might be our villain, but this fight was never about your feet. It's about your muscles. You have muscles. All of them know the door trick.
So here's the menu version of our anchor habits. The after-dinner ten? It can be ten minutes of walking, OR ten minutes of seated or standing moves while the kitchen TV plays. The hourly get-up? It can be a get-up, or an hourly set of whatever your body does comfortably. Same science. Same door. Same challenge. And look, I need you to hear this exactly right: you're not doing the modified version. You're doing THE version. Dempsey's people didn't get modified results. They got results.
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Your challenge this week, whoever you are: swap one walk for one no-walk session and prove to yourself it counts. And if you CAN walk but you know somebody who can't, this is the episode to send them. This is the one. This is why the share button exists.
yourbestt1dyear.com, free tracker, and yes, it has room to count all of this.
You're not doing a bad job. You never were. Some of you just got handed a challenge that wasn't built for your body, and I'm sorry it took the internet this long to fix that.
We are the ones. Every body. Every version. We are the ones. My name is Neil. Friday, the weather turns and we get there first. See you then.
This is the episode script as read on the mic. It's education and encouragement, not medical advice. Talk to your care team before changing anything about your management.