Walking motivation: how to keep walking when it gets boring

The walk is not the hard part

Nobody needs to be taught how to walk. The first walk of a new habit is easy, and so is the second. Somewhere around the second week, the same loop past the same houses starts to feel like homework, the evening it rains is a good reason to skip, and the evening after that is easier to skip too. That is not a lack of willpower. A walk that goes nowhere new gives you nothing to look forward to, and the benefits are too slow and too quiet to pull you out of the door on their own.

So the question is not how to walk more. It is how to make tomorrow’s walk something you want. Three things come up again and again in the research, and in what people who keep walking say about it.

1. Something to look forward to

In a 2014 experiment at a university gym, researchers gave people gripping audiobooks they could only listen to at the gym. Those with the gym-only audiobooks went 51% more often than the control group at first. The effect faded over the weeks, especially after Thanksgiving, but afterwards 61% of participants chose to pay to keep the arrangement. The researchers called it temptation bundling: tie something you want to something you should do.

For walking, that means keeping one good thing for the walk only. A podcast you save for it, an audiobook you are not allowed to play at home, a phone call with someone you like. The walk stops being the cost and becomes the way to get the thing.

2. Progress you can see

A 2007 review in JAMA pooled 26 studies of people given a pedometer. In the randomised trials, pedometer users walked about 2,500 more steps a day than people without one, and one of the strongest predictors of that increase was having a step goal. Counting alone helps. Counting toward something helps more.

A number on a screen is a start. A goal with a shape is better: a distance to a place, a streak you can see, a line on a map that gets longer every evening. The walk you took today should visibly move something, so that skipping tomorrow visibly stops it.

3. Someone who notices

In the STEP UP trial, 602 adults tracked their steps for 24 weeks, and some were put into small games with other people: supporting each other, working as a team, or competing. All three groups walked more than the control group, and competition worked best, about 920 extra steps a day. When the games ended, the competition group was the only one still walking clearly more than the controls.

You do not need a trial to use this. Walk with a friend, share your count with a sibling, or pick someone who walks about as much as you and try to beat them this week. Being noticed, or being chased, is one of the few things that reliably gets people out on the evening they would rather stay in.

How to make walking fun

Put the three together and a walk changes character. Keep a story or a podcast for it, so there is something waiting. Give it a destination, so every walk moves you somewhere. And bring someone in, as a partner or a rival, so somebody notices when you don’t go. None of it makes the walk itself different. It makes tomorrow’s walk worth taking.

How reTrek does it

We built reTrek around exactly these three. Your daily steps carry you along a real route, Everest Base Camp, the Inca Trail, the Camino de Santiago and others, with a short film about the place waiting at each milestone: something to look forward to. Your progress shows on the map every evening: progress you can see. And you can walk a route with friends and pool your steps, or race them there: someone who notices. If you prefer stories, quests are branching mysteries that only move when you walk. Everest Base Camp is free, so the first stretch costs nothing but a walk.