Why what happens between your sessions may shape your health more than the sessions themselves.

Here's something worth being honest about.

A few months ago, moving between terminals at an airport — no bags to carry, nowhere urgent to be — I took the escalator. Not because I was exhausted. Just because it was there, and it was the obvious path, and I wasn't thinking about it.

I'm someone who climbs mountains for recreation. Who built a company around movement. Who genuinely believes that how you move through the world shapes who you become. And I still defaulted to the escalator.

That's how modern convenience works. Nobody decides to be sedentary. We just follow the path of least resistance, one small choice at a time, until stillness becomes the default and movement becomes the exception we have to consciously opt back into.

Science has a name for what we're losing when that happens. It's called NEAT.

What NEAT Is — and Why It Changes the Picture

NEAT stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. It refers to all the energy your body burns through movement that isn't structured exercise — walking between places, taking stairs, standing, carrying things, moving through your day with some degree of physical engagement.

Not training. Just living.

It sounds almost too ordinary to matter. But research led by Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic found that differences in NEAT between individuals can account for up to 2,000 calories per day — not from their workouts, but from everything surrounding them.

Break down how the body actually burns energy across a full day, and the numbers are startling:

That last number is the one that surprises people. Your actual workout accounts for roughly 5% of your daily energy expenditure. NEAT accounts for up to six times more. And crucially, it's the component that varies most dramatically from person to person.

Two people can follow identical training programmes and have meaningfully different health outcomes, body composition, and energy levels — simply because of how much they move outside of them.

The Active Couch Potato Effect

There's a pattern that emerges when someone exercises regularly but spends the rest of their day almost completely still. Researchers call it the "active couch potato" effect.

You've technically moved. Your session happened. But between the morning workout and bedtime, you sat at a desk for eight hours, took elevators, ordered lunch to your door, drove short distances, and spent the evening on a couch. The body doesn't average all of that out against your workout. It responds to each state independently.

Research published in The Lancet and the Annals of Internal Medicine found that prolonged sitting is associated with increased cardiovascular risk and mortality — including in people who meet recommended exercise guidelines. Exercise offsets some of the risk. It doesn't cancel it entirely.

For people who are already training consistently, eating reasonably, and sleeping adequately — NEAT is often the quietly missing variable. The one that explains why two people with similar routines have different results. Why energy plateaus. Why the scale doesn't move despite genuine effort.

How Modern Life Engineers Movement Out

The defaults of contemporary life are stacked against NEAT — and they're getting more efficient at it every year.

Think about how many friction points have been removed from daily movement in the last decade alone. Food delivered to your door. Cars and autos summoned with a tap. Elevators to every floor. In Mumbai, we have genuine heat as a contextual factor — but if we're being honest, "it's too hot" has long since become a catch-all justification for distances that have nothing to do with temperature. The four-minute walk to the convenience store becomes a drive. The two-floor climb becomes an elevator ride.

And then there are the subtler ones. I spent years in environments where messaging a colleague sitting twenty metres away felt faster than walking over. Where the car was the first instinct for any journey, regardless of distance. Where the escalator was simply the obvious path because it was placed directly in front of you and the stairs were off to the side.

Each individual convenience is defensible. Together, they compound into a life where the body is almost never asked to do anything.

Where Rucking Fits Into This

NEAT is fundamentally about frequency and distribution — movement spread across the whole day rather than concentrated into a single session.

Rucking — walking with load — sits at a useful intersection here. It doesn't require a gym, a class, or a blocked-off hour. It integrates into movement you're already doing. The walk to a meeting. The morning commute on foot. An errand run. A lunch break along the seafront.

Adding even a modest load to routine walking changes the metabolic equation significantly. It engages the posterior chain, elevates heart rate, increases caloric expenditure, and builds functional strength — without adding time. You're not creating a new window in your day. You're multiplying the return on movement you were already making.

This is why we think of rucking not just as a workout but as a movement practice. It's designed to travel with you through your day, not wait for you at the gym.

Small Shifts That Actually Add Up

None of this requires an overhaul. It requires catching your defaults and occasionally choosing differently.

• Walk the short distances. If it's under fifteen minutes on foot, build the walk into your plan rather than finding reasons to skip it. The walk is almost always more feasible than it feels.
• Take the stairs as a rule. Not as a fitness challenge — just as how you move between floors. Make it the default so it stops requiring a decision.
• Add load when you walk. A light ruck — even 10 lbs (5 kg) — transforms routine walking into genuine conditioning. You're not adding time. You're multiplying return on movement you were already making.
• Reframe the internal justification. When the reasoning appears — "it's too hot," "I'll walk tomorrow," "it's just this once" — pause for a moment. Sometimes it's legitimate. Often it's just the path of least resistance dressed up as logic.
• Break up long sitting stretches. Set a reminder if you need to. After 45 minutes at a desk, stand up, walk to get water, do a lap. Frequency across the day matters more than intensity in a session.
  
  
                In the mountains — where movement is the only option.

The Bigger Picture

I came to fitness through the mountains. Trekking, climbing, long days at altitude where the only option is to keep moving. What those experiences taught me isn't about peak performance — it's about consistency. The summit isn't won in the final push. It's won in the accumulated movement of every hour before it.

NEAT works the same way. It's not about any one walk, or any one flight of stairs. It's about the aggregate of hundreds of small choices made across weeks and months and years. Two thousand extra calories burned daily doesn't come from a single decision. It comes from a thousand tiny ones — each so small they barely register, until you look back and realize they've built something significant.

Your body adapts to how you live, not just how you train.

Move more. Between the sessions, across the day, through the small moments that don't feel like movement at all.

That's where most of the work actually happens.