GHENT, Belgium (Reuters) – Yves Hanoulle has been working from home throughout Belgium’s coronavirus lockdown, but he has still managed to walk about 1,500 km (930 miles) by pacing through each day on a treadmill installed under his desk.

“I’ve calculated that since the lockdown for COVID-19 I’ve actually done 27,000 steps a day for three months now,” said Hanoulle, 48, an IT teams coach who lives in the town of Ghent.

Hanoulle said he walks at around 2.3 km an hour for eight hours while working each day and sometimes turns the speed up in the evening to read a book, clocking up more than 20 km (12.5 miles) and almost double that distance on one strenuous day.

“I read … that sitting is the new smoking and that we humans are not really made for sitting all the time,” he told Reuters as he walked on the treadmill belt and worked on computers perched on an elevated desk.

“And so when I started doing this I immediately noticed in myself that I feel a lot more fitter and that it’s much easier to focus.”