In October 2024, I took advantage of an Amazon Prime deal to buy myself a ‘walking pad’. For the uninitiated, walking pads are treadmills designed for home use. While some models are suitable for running on, most are aimed at sustaining moderate to brisk walking speeds. Though, as with so many gadgets these days, there is a lot of choice out there (Amazon currently has 414 search results for the term ‘walking pad’).

In 2024, these devices had become quite popular, and there were a lot of low-priced options on Amazon. I already had a cheap standing desk solution (a unit that you place on top of your existing desk to raise the monitor and keyboard), so I felt it was time to take the plunge to see if I could walk while I worked.

I opted for a folding walking pad model as I envisaged moving it aside when not in use, lowering the desk and using my chair. This is what I chose, the WalkingPad Z1 (sometimes marketed under the ‘Kingsmith’ brand in other markets).

Computer-generated image of a woman in sports clothing walking on the black walking pad. An inset image shows the walking pad partly folded. There is no background detail and everything else is white. — WalkingPad Z1 image from WalkingPad website.

First steps

In my first few months with it, I experimented with lots of different walking speeds to work out how fast I could comfortably walk while still working. I didn’t want to use the walking pad while in meetings, but I needed to be able to walk at speeds that allowed for fine mouse control.

The remote that comes with the desk allows you to make changes to the speed in 0.5 kilometres per hour (km/h) increments. If you pair it with the (somewhat flakey) app, you can increase the precision to 0.1 km/h increments.

I found that 2.0, 2.5, and 3.0 Kmph speeds were perfectly fine for all of the type of work I do. Moving beyond 3.5 km/h means that it can get trickier when I’m trying to do anything requiring careful mouse control. I have tried working while walking as fast as 5 km/h, but that’s not easy (and also becomes much more tiring).

In those first few months, I found myself walking for up to 30 minutes, 2-3 times a day and then switching to my chair (or just standing).

Data, data, data

After two and a half months, I ended 2024 having walked 335,484 steps (130 miles). I know this not because of the stats from the walking pad itself (or from its app) but from the careful (some would say excessive) data logging that I did from every session.

I’ve long been using the excellent Pedometer++ app on my iPhone and Apple Watch to track my step usage and I have (for many years) aimed at getting at least 10,000 steps a day.

So before every session on the walking pad, I would log the following:

date
time
starting step count
starting mile count
walking speed

And then at the end of every walk, I’d log the duration and final step/mile counts.

Being somewhat obsessed with logging data in spreadsheets, I quickly started tracking more and more statistics relating to my walks. This included, but was not limited to: steps per hour, average walking speed (using mean, median, and mode), average time spent walking above and below the mean, and total miles walked. My main spreadsheet for this ended up with 27 columns of data.

Line chart showing how my average daily walking speed has changed over time (since November 2024). Chart has three series plotted that track the average speed as measured by the mean, median and mode. Modal and median end the year at 3.5 km/h — Line chart showing how my average walking speed changed over time

And I would walk…

By the start of 2025, I was getting into the swing of it and found myself walking for longer periods (anything up to an hour) and standing more when I wasn’t walking. In previous years, I had found that my office got a bit chilly in winter, but I found that walking a lot just made that problem go away.

I set myself the goal of walking 500 miles and I reached this goal on 16 May 2025.

By this point, I had tried walking at every 0.1 km/h increment from 2.0 to 5.0 km/h. Partly because it is just easier to use the remote rather than the app, I mostly walked at 3.5 km/h or 3.0 km/h if I was tired or needed more mouse control.

1,000 miles

On December 30 2025, I reached 1,000 miles. Most of these miles corresponded to steps taken while actively working, but increasingly, I would just spend more of my spare time catching up on things like household finances, all while walking.

I removed the chair from my office a long time ago now and I only ever work standing up or walking. The longest walk I have done to date is 83 minutes, which gave me 8,243 steps!

Chart showing cumulative miles walked on the walking pad. X-axis shows date (starting at 25 October 2024) and y-axis shows total miles walked. Graph shows a fairly linear progress from zero miles to 1,000 miles walked by the end of 2025. — My progress towards 1,000 miles

2025 - a record year

One of the things I like about using Pedometer++ as my step-counting-app-of-choice is that it provides lots of stats, tracking eight different metrics for each week, month and year.

My previous record year - in terms of average steps per day - was 2016, where I averaged 12,731 steps per day. I was just about able to beat this in 2025 and ended up with an average of 12,769 steps per day.

2016 was also a record for me for total steps walked (4,659,843). I had initially assumed that if I beat my record for average steps per day, then it would also have to be a record for total steps…except I had forgotten that 2016 was a leap year with an extra day.

I only realised this with two days left of the year. This meant that I would need to average 21,000 steps on each of those last two days to beat my previous record. I was just able to do this (thanks to help from the walking pad) and ended up with 4,660,702 steps for the year.

All of this means that I have averaged about 70 miles a month on the walking pad!

The future

I think I’ve reached the point where I no longer need to log every session on the walking pad. I’m writing these words as I walk without having entered any details of my starting steps or time of day, which feels quite freeing.

Going forwards, I will aim to keep walking-while-working as much as is practical.

If I’m really feeling brave, I might try to make 2026 break all previous step records (as measured by the Pedometer++ app). My previous record for ‘total distance’ is from 2016 and stands at 2,173 miles. To beat this, I will need to walk a lot more on the walking pad (about 24 extra miles every month). But maybe this is the impetus I need to start running again; it’s been several years since I regularly ran 5 km races (mostly through Parkrun) and doing this in 2016 is what helped contribute to those extra miles.