I always have various unfinished posts and ideas sitting in my Drafts folder so this is me having a bit of a clear out.

These Boots Are Made for Walkin’

I’m not a fan of strolling but I don’t mind a bit of fast or power walking.  With the gyms locked down (prior to the recent reopenings), I added walking to my exercise routine.

One loop around the estate is a 9-min fast walk and I try to do this twice a day (rain  or shine), before I start work and after I’ve logged off for the day. I’m not walking any great distances on a daily basis – it’s probably more important to me that I push my heart rate up when I’m walking.

That said, I’ve also been on a few 6-7 mile walks on trails near where I live and last month did a trail in Yorkshire.

Get Paid to Walk

At around the time I started doing more walking, I came across an Android-only app called winwalk*. The blurb states:

winwalk is a free and easy to use pedometer that will motivate you to walk more every day and will boost your activity level

The bonus is that you can get paid with egift cards/vouchers.

Scam or real? I thought I’d try it out.

So, for every 100 steps which are tracked by the app, you are awarded one coin. Coins are coverted into gift cards.

You need 20,000 coins to convert into a gift card. The app uses the arbitrary ‘healthy’ measure of 10k steps a day to cap the amount of coins you can earn from walking to just 100 coins a day.

So just from walking, assuming that you clock 10k steps every day, that would take 200 days to accumulate enough coins to redeem a voucher. Hmm…doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort, particularly as I only average around only 5k a day?

But wait, there are other ways to earn more coins, including watching video ads, downloading and playing games and answering surveys.

I’ve been doing the latter and have found it relatively easy to earn a few hundred more coins each day, on top of the 100 coin limit you can earn from walking.

Recent  surveys I’ve answered have been quite interesting, including ones on my shopping habits during lockdown, my work situation during the pandemic and my finances (all anonymous).

You even get awarded a few coins if you don’t qualify for surveys so it’s probably worth clicking as many surveys as you want to spend/waste time on. Surveys can last from 1-15 mins – usually the longer the survey, the more coins you are awarded.

So after a little over 2 months, I’d collected my 20k coins and I painlessly redeemed them for my chosen gift voucher:

Other giftcards are available, including (at the last check, as they seem to change periodically) Argos, Tesco, Currys/PC World, Primark, Nike, Sports Direct and Spotify to name a few.

This app obviously isn’t going to make you rich but if you’re going to be clocking up your steps anyway as you go about your daily life, when you take the dog out for a walk etc, why not have your steps go towards earning gift cards? All the other stuff, eg surveys are optional and require little effort even if you do choose to do them.

A couple of notes:

• I have the app set so it’s running in the background all the time. I don’t know if it works on any other setting
• Make sure you bank all the coins you earn so they are added to your account. The collected coins are reset at midnight so if not banked, you could lose coins you’ve earned

Conclusion

Although I’ve returned to the gym, I’ve continued to walk daily so perhaps lockdown has helped me develop more active behaviour for the long term and as such, I’ll continue with this app a while longer to collect my coins!