It’s a banal TikTok challenge but it has the merit of extolling the health benefits of walking. Nicolas Masset, an overweight young man, uses the platform to motivate himself to walk, to reach 10,000 steps per day and to lose weight.
Nicolas Masset is a mathematics teacher, but also a young man with extra pounds who set himself a challenge: to walk for an hour a day every day. A challenge that he shares on his TikTok account, whose videos always begin with the same sentence: “Hi, I’m Nico and I walk every day for a year to stop to be fat“.
Do it publicly to force yourself to be accountable
If he chose to make his approach public, there is a reason: the young man wanted to force himself by this means to go out for a walk every day, whatever the weather outside. “The idea was to walk for an hour a day but to do it publicly” explains the private teacher, who works from home. “I wanted to expose myself on social networks in order to have someone to answer to. Because we know that when we do something publicly, it forces us to do it every day. Otherwise it’s a bit of a shame not to be able to do it.”
A challenge that started last December
The 1is December, this father began his challenge. He has been filming himself every day, aware of the sedentary lifestyle caused by his job. In fact, what clicked came when he weighed himself and saw 133 kg appear on the scale, even though he was only 33 years old.
He also describes the feeling of being “very quickly out of breath” when he plays with his children. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I needed to take breaks every 5 minutes because I wasn’t used to it at all.” he describes again. From that moment on, he set himself the goal of going out every morning to walk along a cycle path near his home. It’s 6 kilometers round trip, in just under an hour.
He motivates people to do like him
Since launching his challenge, Nicolas Masset has motivated other people to do the same. “Today I see that I have motivated other people to get started, to film themselves… I see that I have become an example for a lot of people, it’s a pleasant surprise”, he says. His account is now followed by more than 40,000 people and others have taken up the idea and also film themselves walking. For his part, after more than a hundred days, Nicolas has lost 7 kg and already feels better.
Do you really need to walk 10,000 steps a day?
So how far should you walk on a daily basis to benefit from the benefits of walking? According to a new study on the subject, which was carried out on a million people over ten years, the optimal number of steps would be 7,500, to be taken at least four times a week.
According to the results of English researchers from the London School of Economics, this would extend the life expectancy of sedentary men by 2.5 years and up to 3 years for women.
