Tools Self-checks up to 11 questions

Am I moving enough?

up to 11 questions · about 3 minutes · scored on your device, nothing saved

This is educational, not diagnostic. These questions help you notice a pattern in your own routine. They cannot tell you what is causing it, and they are not a substitute for care from a doctor or clinician.

Your answers are scored on your device. Nothing you enter here is sent to us or saved.

Most answers to this question are either a number somebody made up or a training plan you did not ask for. The 10,000-step target is the famous example: it came from a pedometer marketing campaign, not from research, and the actual data put the useful range well below it.

This check does something narrower and more useful. There are two published targets for adults, one for the moving that makes you breathe harder, one for the work that loads your muscles, and they are separate targets for a reason. We ask what your week actually looks like, compare it to both, and tell you which of the two to close first. Most women are much closer on one than the other, and it is almost always the same one.

It is a description of your current week, not a fitness test and not a training prescription. We compare your answers to published general guidance for adults. We have not tested this quiz against any clinical measure.

How this self-check is put together

There are two separate published targets for adults, and we score them separately rather than blending them. The World Health Organization's 2020 guidelines recommend 150-300 minutes a week of moderate activity or 75-150 minutes of vigorous, plus muscle-strengthening activity on two or more days, and they removed the old requirement that activity be accumulated in bouts of at least ten minutes (Bull 2020). That removal matters for how this quiz scores: minutes spread across the day count.

Why two reads instead of one number. Because the two targets are met at very different rates, and blending them would hide the gap that matters. Across 1,735,626 US adults, the share meeting the muscle-strengthening guideline rose only from 29.1% to 30.3% over six years, with women consistently less likely to meet it than men (Bennie 2020); among 383,928 adults, just 23.5% met the combined aerobic and strengthening guidelines (Bennie 2019). A single fitness score would let a good walking habit conceal a zero on the target you are most likely to be missing.

What we do with steps, and why 10,000 is not the figure. The step question is optional and does not affect your result: it is there so we can show you where your number sits. The pooled evidence puts the useful range well below the familiar target: across 57 studies, 7,000 steps a day against 2,000 was associated with 47% lower all-cause mortality (HR 0.53, 95% CI 0.46-0.60), with the risk reduction flattening around 5,000-7,000 for most outcomes (Ding 2025). In a harmonised analysis of 15 cohorts the dose-response inflection sat at 6,000-8,000 steps a day in adults over 60 (Paluch 2022). In older women specifically, mortality declined until roughly 7,500 steps and then plateaued, with the top step quartile at HR 0.42 (95% CI 0.30-0.60) (Lee 2019); in US adults, 8,000 steps against 4,000 carried HR 0.49 (95% CI 0.44-0.55) (Saint-Maurice 2020). Step intensity was not significant after adjusting for total steps in either. And for context on what is normal rather than optimal, normative reviews put healthy adults at roughly 4,000 to 18,000 steps a day (Tudor-Locke 2011), with older adults averaging 2,000 to 9,000 (Tudor-Locke 2011b).

Why the strength questions ask about progression and weight-bearing. Because those are where the results in the trials came from. Muscle-strengthening activity has been associated with 10-17% lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, total cancer, diabetes and lung cancer (Momma 2022). For bone specifically, eight months of high-intensity resistance and impact training in postmenopausal women with low bone mass improved lumbar spine bone density by 2.9% against a 1.2% loss in controls (Watson 2017); high-load resistance training pools at SMD 1.40 for lumbar spine density (Kitsuda 2021); and across exercise types in postmenopausal women, dynamic resistance training (SMD 0.40) and weight-bearing exercise (SMD 0.26) both improved lumbar spine density (Kemmler 2020). One network meta-analysis found three sessions a week better than two for lumbar spine density (Wang 2023), which is why the third session earns a point. There is also a life-stage reason this target matters for Femy's readers: premenopausal middle-aged women had greater appendicular lean mass and femoral neck bone density than postmenopausal women of similar age (Sipilä 2020).

An important limit on that evidence. LIFTMOR and the high-load trials were supervised programmes, and the supervision is part of why they were safe. Nothing on this page recommends heavy or high-impact loading, and if you have been told you have low bone density, have broken a bone from a minor knock, get pain when you load a joint, or have had joint surgery recently, we leave the progression advice out entirely and point you at a physiotherapist or your GP.

Why sitting is not scored. Because its association with mortality is conditional on how active you are, and scoring it additively would state a claim the evidence does not support. Among the least active third of adults, mortality risk rose across increasing thirds of sedentary time to HR 2.63 (95% CI 1.93-3.57), and the association attenuated in more active participants (Ekelund 2020), consistent with the harmonised analysis of over a million adults which found the risk of high sitting time attenuated or eliminated in the most active (Ekelund 2016). So your sitting hours change the sentence we show you rather than your score. Where breaking up sitting is worth doing, the specific thing that works is short light walks rather than standing: light-intensity walking breaks reduced post-meal glucose (d = -0.72) and insulin (d = -0.83) and outperformed standing breaks (Buffey 2022).

Why there is no fitness score, fitness age or VO2 estimate. Equations exist that estimate cardiorespiratory fitness without an exercise test (Jurca 2005), and we have deliberately not used one. A fitness estimate is a claim about your body; this page describes your week. The same reasoning rules out a 'fitness age' figure.

Limits of this estimate. Self-reported activity is only loosely related to measured activity. The IPAQ's own 12-country study found test-retest repeatability clustering around 0.8 but criterion validity against accelerometry with a median correlation of about 0.30 (Craig 2003). People generally over-report. Read your result as a rough placement, not a measurement.

The guideline figures are recommendations for adults in general. They are not a range you have fallen outside of, and the population adherence figures we quote describe adults, not you. We compare your answers to published general guidance for adults. We have not tested this quiz against any clinical measure. Pregnancy has its own activity guidance, which is a conversation for your midwife or GP.

Persistent problems deserve support. If you get chest pain, pressure or tightness when you exert yourself, that needs assessing before you change anything about how you move: please contact your GP today or call 111. And if things you could do easily a few months ago now feel hard, that change is worth an appointment rather than pushing through.

Common questions

How should I use this estimate?

Close the target that came out short, and ignore the other one for now. The whole point of scoring the two separately is that they need different actions and almost nobody is equally short on both.

Is this medical advice?

No. Femy is educational content about wellness habits. It does not diagnose, treat, or replace care from a doctor or clinician. If you have a heart, joint, or pregnancy-related condition, check with a clinician before increasing what you do.

Is 10,000 steps a day the target?

No, and it never was a research figure: it came from a pedometer marketing campaign. The pooled data put the flattening of the mortality curve nearer 7,000 steps a day, with the plateau in older women around 7,500. If you are on 7,000 you are not falling short.

Does my desk job cancel out my exercise?

Largely, no, and this is where most content gets it wrong. The risk associated with long sitting hours is much clearer in people who are otherwise inactive, and in a million-participant analysis it was attenuated or eliminated among the most active. Breaking up sitting is still worth doing, and short light walks do more for it than standing does.

Why does it ask whether my weights have got heavier?

Because progression is where the results in the trials came from, not attendance. That said, nothing here recommends heavy lifting: the trials that produced the bone-density gains were supervised, and if you have any bone or joint concern we leave the progression advice out and point you at a physiotherapist instead.

What happens to what I enter?

It is scored on your device against figures that ship with the page. Nothing you enter is sent to us or saved. We count how many people finish and which of the four results they get, as totals only.

Sources checked

Built from published research, with every source listed below. We checked these sources for the figures we quote: the typical ranges, the guideline targets, and the doses used in the trials we describe. We compare your answers to published general guidance for adults. We have not tested this quiz against any clinical measure.

  1. Bull (2020). World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. British Journal of Sports Medicine. doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2020-102955
  2. Ding (2025). Daily steps and health outcomes in adults: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis. The Lancet Public Health. doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(25)00164-1
  3. Paluch (2022). Daily steps and all-cause mortality: a meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts. The Lancet Public Health. doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(21)00302-9
  4. Lee (2019). Association of Step Volume and Intensity With All-Cause Mortality in Older Women. JAMA Internal Medicine. doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0899
  5. Saint-Maurice (2020). Association of Daily Step Count and Step Intensity With Mortality Among US Adults. JAMA. doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.1382
  6. Tudor-Locke (2011). How many steps/day are enough? for adults. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. doi.org/10.1186/1479-5868-8-79
  7. Tudor-Locke (2011). How many steps/day are enough? For older adults and special populations. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. doi.org/10.1186/1479-5868-8-80
  8. Ahmadi (2023). Brief bouts of device-measured intermittent lifestyle physical activity and its association with major adverse cardiovascular events and mortality in people who do not exercise: a prospective cohort study. The Lancet Public Health. doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(23)00183-4
  9. Ekelund (2020). Joint associations of accelerometer-measured physical activity and sedentary time with all-cause mortality: a harmonised meta-analysis in more than 44 000 middle-aged and older individuals. British Journal of Sports Medicine. doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2020-103270
  10. Ekelund (2016). Does physical activity attenuate, or even eliminate, the detrimental association of sitting time with mortality? A harmonised meta-analysis of data from more than 1 million men and women. The Lancet. doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30370-1
  11. Ekelund (2019). Dose-response associations between accelerometry measured physical activity and sedentary time and all cause mortality: systematic review and harmonised meta-analysis. BMJ. doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l4570
  12. Buffey (2022). The Acute Effects of Interrupting Prolonged Sitting Time in Adults with Standing and Light-Intensity Walking on Biomarkers of Cardiometabolic Health in Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Sports Medicine. doi.org/10.1007/s40279-022-01649-4
  13. Bennie (2020). Trends in Muscle-Strengthening Exercise Among Nationally Representative Samples of United States Adults Between 2011 and 2017. Journal of Physical Activity and Health. doi.org/10.1123/jpah.2019-0472
  14. Bennie (2019). The epidemiology of aerobic physical activity and muscle-strengthening activity guideline adherence among 383,928 U.S. adults. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. doi.org/10.1186/s12966-019-0797-2
  15. Momma (2022). Muscle-strengthening activities are associated with lower risk and mortality in major non-communicable diseases: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies. British Journal of Sports Medicine. doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2021-105061
  16. Watson (2018). High-Intensity Resistance and Impact Training Improves Bone Mineral Density and Physical Function in Postmenopausal Women With Osteopenia and Osteoporosis: The LIFTMOR Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Bone and Mineral Research. doi.org/10.1002/jbmr.3284
  17. Kitsuda (2021). Impact of high-load resistance training on bone mineral density in osteoporosis and osteopenia: a meta-analysis. Journal of Bone and Mineral Metabolism. doi.org/10.1007/s00774-021-01218-1
  18. Kemmler (2020). Effects of Different Types of Exercise on Bone Mineral Density in Postmenopausal Women: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Calcified Tissue International. doi.org/10.1007/s00223-020-00744-w
  19. Wang (2023). Comparative efficacy different resistance training protocols on bone mineral density in postmenopausal women: A systematic review and network meta-analysis. Frontiers in Physiology. doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2023.1105303
  20. Nelson (1994). Effects of High-Intensity Strength Training on Multiple Risk Factors for Osteoporotic Fractures. JAMA. doi.org/10.1001/jama.1994.03520240037038
  21. Sipilä (2020). Muscle and bone mass in middle‐aged women: role of menopausal status and physical activity. Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle. doi.org/10.1002/jcsm.12547
  22. COLEMAN (2012). Initial Validation of an Exercise “Vital Sign” in Electronic Medical Records. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. doi.org/10.1249/mss.0b013e3182630ec1
  23. CRAIG (2003). International Physical Activity Questionnaire: 12-Country Reliability and Validity. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. doi.org/10.1249/01.MSS.0000078924.61453.FB
  24. Jurca (2005). Assessing Cardiorespiratory Fitness Without Performing Exercise Testing. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2005.06.004
  25. Mountjoy (2023). 2023 International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs). British Journal of Sports Medicine. doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2023-106994