I know, this is the post you’ve been dying to hear. How on earth a Fitbit (or any fitness tracker) could be helpful motivation for someone recovering from major surgery doing minimal walking.
One can set the hours, and the thing will nudge you if you haven’t gone at least 250 steps every hour. It buzzes at me at 50 minutes after the hour if I'm under 250 steps. During work hours, this is a huge annoyance when I would normally love to be active but I’m stuck in meetings or don’t even feel like I can take a break. Not having that tied-to-a-desk structure, I can actually set a broader range to be at least a little bit active. 250 is not a lot, but I think the idea is to at least get up once in a while. Who knows what information out there is accurate or not, but I saw an article claiming it wasn’t the total number of hours one sits, that is dangerous, but how long in a row one sits in a row. If that’s correct, some of these trackers have the right idea to nudge you every hour.
The other thing that’s nice is having an impartial judge of how much activity I’m doing. I’m not aiming for strenuous exercise (that’s a no-no right now) but it does tell me if my pulse is up, and for how long, for even moderate activity. Sure, why not get credit for that? The idea for my recovery is to walk often and for longer stretches. However I get my steps in, some here or there, or walking in pace during commercial breaks watching a show, at least it tracks them for me and gives me a decent count. Unlike those days where they used to tell you to guess how much or how active you were by how hard it felt. That’s a joke. If you’re tired, the same amount of exercise (or steps) is going to feel harder than when you’re full of energy. Ask anyone with a less than perfect job. The walk in to the office Monday morning is a lot different than the walk out on Friday afternoon. Sure, one could argue which model is 99% accurate vs. 98%, and if it auto-detects this kind of activity or that, has gps, blah, blah, blah. This is perfect for what I need right now. I could see I did 1200 steps the day of surgery, and how I've increased a little bit ever since. My highest was only 6700 so far, but it'll get there. I was barely getting 8k steps before surgery.
Granted, walking indoors vs. outdoors does feel very different muscle-wise, and that's another story. My surgeon said don't worry about it for now; all activity is good activity, whether marching in place or covering distance. They say walking is the perfect weight-loss activity. Let's try to prove them right. Let's try not to focus on all the muscle I may be slowly losing while I'm not allowed to do any strength excercises or lifting.
At least one week out I'm doing ok if I try to ignore the bruises still on my hands (from the IVs) and itchy skin from the surgial glue (protects the wounds and stitches). Week two I should be working up to 10 minute walks, and this morning I did 11 minutes. That's something.
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