Making time to move

Areeb Ahmed's working day begins with a walk.

After waking for Fajr prayers, and before getting ready for work, he walks for about 30 minutes. By the time he checks his smartwatch, he has usually completed around 3,000 steps. It is the first installment towards a target that will follow him for the rest of the day.

Then he gets into his car and drives to work.

For the next nine to 10 hours, Ahmed spends much of his time at a desk. Every hour or so, his watch reminds him that he has been sitting for too long. He gets up, walks around and tries to add another 200 or 250 steps. By the end of the working day, those small breaks might have added another 2,000.

That still leaves about half his target. After returning home, Ahmed tries to walk for another 30 minutes after Maghrib prayers. If there are still steps remaining after Isha, he finds another way to complete them.

“I don't get time for the gym, so walking is the only option I feel I can do anywhere,” he says.

Ahmed has deliberately built movement into different parts of his day. Yet when he recently tried to calculate how much of that same day he actually spends sitting, the number surprised him. Between his desk, commute and time at home, he estimated that he can actually spend around 13 of his 17 waking hours seated.

His routine also reflects a wider reality of urban life in Pakistan, where movement can easily disappear from the working day. Office hours are largely spent seated, many people drive or ride even relatively short distances, and everyday routines do not always require much walking. Staying active, therefore, can require a conscious effort to put movement back into the day.

It is a contradiction familiar to modern working life: even someone deliberately trying to stay active can spend most of the day sitting. Movement is no longer always something that happens naturally. For some, it has become something that has to be planned and counted.

When sitting becomes the default

Ahmed's routine is hardly unusual. For many people with corporate jobs, much of the working day requires little physical movement. The journey to work is often spent sitting in a car, followed by hours at a desk, before the same journey is repeated on the way home.

For fitness professional and gym owner Shehzar Muhammad, that lack of everyday movement is something he increasingly sees among working adults.

“Most corporate jobs are sitting indoors nine to five. People barely get to move,” says Muhammad. “In the Western world, people are walking everywhere. Here, everyone is either driving or riding around.”

The effects, he says, often become visible when people arrive at the gym. Those spending eight or nine hours behind a desk commonly complain of stiffness, poor posture and lower-back problems.

But sitting for much of the day and not exercising enough are not necessarily the same thing.

Waheed Qamar, an independent exercise expert, distinguishes between physical inactivity, not getting enough exercise, and sedentary behaviour, which refers to waking time spent sitting or reclining with very little energy expenditure. That means someone can exercise regularly and still spend much of the rest of the day sedentary.

It is sometimes described as the “active couch potato” problem: a morning run or an evening workout does not change the fact that the hours between them may involve very little movement.

That distinction matters for people whose jobs are difficult to perform any other way. Sitting through a meeting or spending hours working at a computer cannot always be avoided. The question becomes what happens between those stretches of inactivity.

Muhammad recommends deliberately interrupting them. “What can you do if you are sitting around working?” he says. “You should put reminders and alarms that you should walk.”

Qamar too recommends breaking up long periods of sitting with brief bouts of movement. Even getting up and walking periodically during the working day can interrupt stretches in which the body has remained largely stationary.

For office workers, then, staying active may begin long before anyone changes into gym clothes. Sometimes it starts simply by getting out of the chair.

Counting steps

Ahmed first started tracking his steps when he bought a smartwatch in 2018. For years, however, the number was little more than something he checked occasionally. He would try to reach 10,000 steps for a while, lose the routine and then start again.

The past six months have been different. It is the longest he has consistently chased the target, completing close to 10,000 steps almost every day.

The number came partly from his smartwatch and partly from fitness information he had looked up online and through AI tools. At 95kg, with a personal goal of reaching 80kg, Ahmed wanted something measurable that could keep him moving even when he could not make time for the gym.

The watch has since started shaping small parts of his day. He tries to walk while taking a phone call or take a slightly longer route when time allows. The step counter has made him more conscious of opportunities to move that he might otherwise have ignored.

Ten thousand, however, is not a magic number. The target originated with a Japanese pedometer marketed in the 1960s rather than a medical threshold, and research since then has found health benefits at lower step counts too. Qamar says the more useful goal is to increase overall daily movement rather than treat 10,000 as a pass-or-fail mark.

For Muhammad, walking should be more ordinary still. “Walking is not exercise, it should be part of your everyday life,” he says. “But because people are not used to even walking for so long, it becomes a thing, it becomes like something hard to do.”

Ahmed sees it more practically. Without regular time for the gym, walking is the activity he can fit around the rest of his day.

His 10,000-step target may be arbitrary, but following it has changed something more fundamental: he notices how much, or how little, he has moved.

From the desk to the court

Not everyone with a corporate job struggles to find time for exercise. For Abdun Nafay, staying active means fitting sport around work and family rather than waiting for the weekend to undo the week.

Nafay works in corporate communications at a manufacturing company. He estimates that four to five hours of his working day, including his commute, are spent sitting. But outside those hours, he deliberately makes room for movement. Thursday is usually reserved for padel, while during the rest of the week he tries to fit in two or three gym sessions and a game of football.

The routine is not fixed. A busy week at work or an evening with his family can take priority, but Nafay says he tries not to let one missed session turn into a longer break.

Weekends usually bring him back to the court. One recent weekend was spent largely with his wife and child, breakfast and lunch together, followed by a family walk. At night, however, he met his friends for two and a half hours of padel.

The games may begin as a chance to socialise, but they do not always stay that way. “The moment someone deliberately hits a hard smash, the court becomes a bit of a war room,” he says.

That competitiveness is part of what keeps Nafay coming back. He wants the social side of the game, but also wants to leave the court feeling that he has physically pushed himself. Sport also gives him a way to switch off from work.

What he does not do is treat those hours as repayment for time spent behind a desk. “I do not think of it as compensation,” he says. “Work and sport each have their own place in my life, and both give me a sense of satisfaction.”

Nafay's routine is more active than that of someone relying on a weekend game as their only exercise. But recreational sport also brings a different demand: after hours spent behind a desk, the body may suddenly be asked to sprint, jump and change direction.

Nafay has already discovered what can happen when that rhythm is interrupted.

Can the weekend make up?

Nafay learnt the importance of staying in rhythm when other commitments kept him away from football for a period. When he returned to play, he picked up an injury that took around three months to recover from.

“It made me more mindful of how I should return to a sport after a break,” he says.

It is a familiar pattern to Muhammad. Someone who has spent much of the week sitting may suddenly ask their body to sprint, jump and change direction during a game of football, cricket or padel.

“Something is better than nothing. If they are playing weekend cricket, at least they get active once or twice a week,” says Muhammad. But the sudden change in intensity can be a problem. “Someone who is sitting all day and then suddenly starts sprinting or jumping can get injured really quickly.”

That does not mean concentrating exercise into one or two days is worthless. The independent exercise expert says research on so-called “weekend warriors” has found that people who accumulate recommended amounts of physical activity over one or two days can still gain substantial health benefits.

The problem is that exercise and sitting are not exact opposites.

According to Qamar, regular sport can improve cardiovascular fitness and strength, but it does not make the hours spent largely motionless during the working week irrelevant. Long periods of sitting are better broken up with movement, even for someone who exercises outside working hours.

For Muhammad, this is why consistency matters more than relying on occasional bursts of intense activity. “Consistency is key because if it's just intensity for one day in a month compared to slowly chipping away consistently per day, I think consistency will matter more,” he says.

Nafay has noticed another change as he has grown older. He can still play hard, but recovery is no longer quite as quick. “After a football match, the fatigue is certainly there, and I may still feel it the next morning,” he says.

The weekend game, then, does not need to compensate for everything that happened from Monday to Friday to be worthwhile. It gets people moving, competing and, often, coming back the following week. But the rest of the week still counts.

Making movement fit

There is no single way to make an otherwise sedentary day more active. Ahmed's answer has been walking. Nafay's involves a gym, a football pitch and a padel court.

For Nafay, maintaining that routine means accepting that it will not always look the same. Work and family can change the week, and exercise has to move with them. What matters to him is returning to it rather than allowing an interruption to become the new routine.

“I do not think being active means having a perfect routine,” he says. “For me, it means continuing to make time to move, play and look after my energy alongside work and family life.”

For Muhammad, the difficulty is often less about identifying what exercise to do than finding a place for it on a working day. “You're never going to have the time, you have to make the time,” he says.

Qamar similarly argues that movement does not have to be confined to a formal workout. Walking during phone calls, taking the stairs and getting away from the desk periodically can all add movement to a day that might otherwise involve hours of sitting.

Technology can provide a push. Muhammad sees value in watches and fitness apps because they allow people to track their activity and progress. But he also cautions against allowing those numbers to dictate how someone feels.

The routines may look different, but each requires the same conscious decision. When work, commuting and home life can all be navigated with very little physical effort, movement has to find its place somewhere.

Before the day is done

There are evenings when Ahmed looks at his watch and the number is still short.

By then, there may be nowhere left to go. Work is finished, he is home and dinner is approaching. But after six months of following the target more consistently than he ever has before, leaving those steps unfinished bothers him.

“I feel like something is missing,” he says. “Whenever I land my eye on the step tracker in my mobile phone or watch, I feel that I have to complete 10,000.”

So he finds somewhere to walk, even if that means staying inside his own home. The destination, in that sense, matters less than the movement. The watch has made Ahmed more conscious of something his working day can otherwise make easy to overlook: how many hours can pass without much movement at all.

For someone who spends much of his day between a desk, a car and home, walking is no longer necessarily a by-product of getting somewhere.

Sometimes, it is the thing he has to make time for before the day is done.