20 Years of Better Health, One Step at a Time: How Walk with a Doc Became a Worldwide Phenomenon
What started as a single walk in Columbus is now a global health movement.
// By Melissa Sher //
Dr. David Sabgir, a cardiologist in Columbus, Ohio, was tired of hearing excuses. He would urge his mostly sedentary patients to get more exercise. They would nod, they would agree, and then they wouldn’t do it. They’d return the following appointment and nothing had changed. He had heard every excuse. They were busy. It was too cold outside. It was too hot inside. The excuses piled up.
Dr. David Sabgir
In 2005, almost no one in his practice was getting the minimum recommendation of 150 minutes of weekly exercise. Sabgir was tired of polite defeat. He decided to try something different: He invited a patient to join him and his family on a walk. Surprisingly, the patient said yes.
Over the next few months, Sabgir extended the invitation to more patients and as many community members as possible. On April 9, 2005, more than 100 people showed up at a local park to walk with him. “The major emotion I felt was relief,” Sabgir recalls. “Because it wasn’t a bust.”
What began as a modest two-mile walk in Columbus has, 20 years later, evolved into “Walk with a Doc,” a nonprofit with more than 500 chapters offering free physician-led walking programs in 48 U.S. communities and 40 countries around the world.
Read on to discover how Sabgir transformed a single walk two decades ago into a global health movement.