Martin Lewis: The steps battle that drove me to average 26,000 steps a day over 2025 (burning ‘4,015’ daily calories)!

No one I know had ever given me a decent challenge before. But that night, the realisation dawned: if I lost the week, my lead for the year would be under threat – but if I won, I might just break Maytal's resolve.

My step nemesis just wouldn’t let it go

I walked while rabidly checking the app. Her total was increasing too, just not quite as quickly as mine, so slowly I was gaining. Eventually, with 10 minutes left of the day, I finally took the lead. I later discovered my step nemesis had resorted to sitting on a living room exercise bike to try to keep ahead, while I was putting the hard yards in. Turns out even if you move your fitness tracker to your ankle, walking still beats cycling.

In the end, I hit 45,684 steps that day, while Maytal had staggeringly done over 50,000. But our contest wasn’t about individual days – it was who could win the most weeks across the year. By that measure, I’d notched up another win: a leg-aching 220,685 steps that week to her 220,100.

I know it sounds crackers!

And I can admit that now, especially as overall I won the year by 33 weeks to 19. Maytal is one of my sister’s best friends – a wonderful, kind-hearted, friendly human being (and thanks to her, for her permission to discuss this) – but also my bitter step count enemy. We’ve been fitness-tracker-app linked for years; she’s often my closest competition, but usually only wins a couple of weeks a year.

In early 2025 she grandly messaged to say she was going to step it up and try and beat me, and as ridiculously competitive as I am, I decided I couldn’t let it happen. Each Monday, when the weekly summary email landed in our in-boxes, we’d WhatsApp each other with who’d won and the latest score.

I’ve averaged over 25,000 steps a day in a year before, but this 26,117 average was a mountain to climb (or more accurately, my 9,532,571 steps was 255,715 more steps to walk than I’d ever done in a year before). According to my fitness tracker, it equates to 23.7km a day on average.

By the last couple of weeks in December, while I'd won the year, as I was still just above the 26,000 average, I resolved to ensure I hit it, so having pushed hard, in the end I'd done enough steps by 30 December, that I could do none the next day and still hit it, so all steps after that were a bonus.

The year's battle was so fierce that both our spouses colluded and told us that ‘walking round the sofa for far too many evenings’ needs to stop. We agree and have discussed possibly even unlinking our apps this year. My goal is to drop down to a more manageable 24,000 to 25,000 average.

Now for the stats…

Yes, put on your walking shoes, rub some balm into your calves and massage your toes (not necessarily in that order) this is my ninth annual steps blog: the quantified self in all its glory. This 2025 total of 9,532,571 steps is my highest ever, so let's go through it in detail, both as a permanent record for me and as I know many people who've read past versions have taken up and enjoyed their own step challenges.

My step-philia will be news to some, but not all (after all, among other things, it featured heavily in my appearance on last year’s Taskmaster New Year Special).

A streaky streak: nearly 10 years, only missing 10,000 steps once…

As I write this, my current never-missing-the-arbitrary-10,000-steps-a-day streak is 886 days. I only missed it that one day (2 Aug 2023) due to severe food poisoning. I was absolutely gutted (literally) when I was too weak to get out of bed, as it broke my prior 2,467-day streak (without that one missed day, in October this year I’d have been on track to hit a 10 year streak).

How my 2025 steps compare

I got my first fitness tracker in 2015, and it had an instant impact on me. As I blogged my 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 steps, I can easily chart my progression. I've not included the calorie count, as I think it's very loose, but this year it says I apparently averaged 4,015 calories burned a day. Since 2015, I've walked/run the equivalent of just over two times round the world (and yet I'm still not getting anywhere!).

It's an obsession, but a deliberate one…

I went too far this year, but I don’t want to give up on it too much, as the health benefits over the last few years have been so positive. The day after I missed my 10,000-steps-a-day target in 2023 Mrs MSE (Lara) said to me, "you're FREE!" but I don't want that freedom; I worry if I let go, it'll never come back.

My steps are all built on self-imposed rules. The sacrosanct one is to never miss the 10,000-a-day buzz, softer are an aim of 25,000 steps a day, and a harder limit to not miss 20,000... over 2025 I only did less than that on seven days.

To help me hit these targets, while I used to run a lot, these days, to protect my knees, I'm fortunate enough to have a home elliptical (cross-trainer).

I do cardio seven days a week, usually first thing in the morning and normally for about 40 minutes (if I'm presenting Good Morning Britain, as thats such an early start, I don't do it, but I do run home). The big advantage of the elliptical is I can read the papers, my emails and key documents, so little work time is lost – which means I'm normally on 6,000 steps or more before I do owt else. Yet that's still less than a quarter of my total days steps.

My big rule… if I'm talking, I'm walking

If I have a phone call to make or a meeting that doesn't need a video call, then I do it while walking. Often, this is outdoors – I try to get all my calls arranged in a row so I can have a long walk. It's now instinctive that if the phone rings and I'm sitting down, I jump up before I answer it. Even if it's a friend in the evening, I get up from my seat and start walking around the room.

Yet much more of this is just part of my schedule... show-day Tuesdays are a good example: I don't get transport to the studio. I do the 75-minute walk to the studio, come rain, frost or snow, and while walking I'm in a Google Meet call with the TV team to work through the structure of the show. We usually finish the meeting about five minutes before I arrive.

And it's not just about calls, it's about transport too – my mentality is to try to avoid any other form of transport unless there's a good reason, for example:

- It's over 10km away or I’m going with other people

- It's very early or very late (or I'm very late)

- I've got golf clubs with me

For many, this will sound bizarre, but I find obeying self-imposed routines can help with health and fitness, so if it keeps me stepping, it's good.

How does this compare with pre-tracker years?

As soon as I got a tracker, I started walking more. As a numbers person, self-monitoring had a real impact.

An example of this is in my running and cross-training (which I have a separate graph for, of course). I used to do this before I had trackers, but the distances covered then were a fraction of what I do now.

Back then, I would graph my times to see if I got quicker. Yet with speed as my key performance indicator, as progression isn't linear, if I'd start a run and realise it wasn't a fast day, it was demotivating and I'd sometimes stop.

Partly due to the tracker, I switched to an annual distance target, which means that every run – or now elliptical – even a slow one, feeds the cardio graph. In 2020, I smashed the pants off my run (and cross-training) total, doing over 2,000km – doubling the prior 1,000km, which was the target. And it's increased since. In 2024, I did over 3,500km combined run and elliptical. In 2025, though, as the settings have changed, it doesn't quite calibrate.

The health impact

While my weight varies (I'm writing this just after the Christmas break and need to refocus on it a bit!), I'm substantially lighter than when I started stepping – no surprise, as according to my fitness tracker, I'm burning 4,000 calories a day. I'm not sure how real that number is, but certainly my energy use is greater.

Some of my repetitive strain injury and back pain has gone (I'd never put this together until I mentioned it to a physio, and he asked if I now walked more, as apparently it's a great help for backs).

I tend to think of running as for fitness and my mental health, while walking is for physical health and relaxation – for the few minutes I'm off the phone when walking, a little bit of me-time or listening to an audiobook in a day is useful. Sadly, it isn't a cure-all for stress and anxiety, but it helps reduce some of the impact.

I've added weight training in, though it's not that step positive

I tend to be put off by exercise that gets me no steps, such as cycling. But I know that as an over-50, weight and resistance exercises are really important.

So a few years ago, I started adding a weight-training section to my exercise graph to encourage me to do it. Sessions are between 10 and 90 minutes. In 2023, I ramped that up and have kept doing so. In 2025, I did weights sessions on 281 days, a new record.

Are the steps accurate?

Apparently, according to the technology broadcaster @LaraLewLew (also known in these blogs as Mrs MSE), step accuracy has improved a lot in recent years – and of course there are now many more ways to count them (she recently wore four different tracking rings for a week to compare them – we are made for each other!).

Regardless, though, accuracy is less important than consistency. I compete with myself based on the same metric: number of steps in a day.

Best of all, though, I find it very rewarding that each year after publishing my annual step count blog many people have been in contact to say that it inspired them to start stepping more – especially the 'never miss your buzz' challenge. I hope a few more people, who are able to, will do so this year.

If you're a stepper too, do let me know how you did last year either via the forum discussion below or on my social feeds on X, Bluesky, Facebook, Threads, or Instagram