7 Major Health Benefits From Walking That Can Improve Your Life

The following is an edited and condensed excerpt of Born to Walk: The Broken Promises of the Running Boom and How to Slow Down and Get Healthy—One Step at a Time.

RUNNING IS MORE popular than ever—but let’s set endurance performance goals aside for a moment and recognize that walking is the quintessential human form of locomotion and the foundation of a healthful, active lifestyle.

The health benefits of walking are legion. They accrue with short, frequent walks as well as with long walks and hikes. Any time you have a few minutes to spare, walking is a fantastic way to generate an immediate boost in energy, mood, musculoskeletal health, and cognitive performance.

Walking helps boost digestion and the assimilation of nutrients; it is directly associated with improved sleep quality; it helps trigger parasympathetic nervous system activity and thus improves stress management; it improves glucose regulation; it helps boost the production of anabolic hormones such as testosterone, human growth hormone, sex hormone–binding globulin, insulin-like growth factor 1, and DHEA; and it generally promotes homeostasis.

Making small shifts in daily routines and habits that enable you to take more daily steps can deliver a phenomenal range of physical and cognitive benefits—especially in the areas listed below.

Health Benefits More Walking Will Bring to Your Life

Brain and Cognition

The connection between walking and brain health is tremendous. Walking boosts the production of an important protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. BDNF has been shown to help improve neuron firing, build new neurons, increase blood circulation and oxygen delivery, help prevent cognitive decline, alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety, and improve neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to form new connections and pathways. Harvard psychiatrist John J. Ratey, MD, calls BDNF “Miracle-Gro for the brain.”

Furthermore, a brief morning stroll is a reliable way to optimize your circadian rhythm and boost mood-elevating hormones such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. This tees you up for a happy, productive day and sets the stage for the hormonal processes that promote restful sleep at night.

When walking becomes a lifelong habit, the hippocampus and other areas of your brain grow thicker, a sign of improved memory formation and consolidation and improved resistance to cognitive decline. A widely publicized 2017 study conducted at UCLA, which compared the MRI scans of active and inactive people over the age of sixty, revealed that active folks have bigger, better brains than inactive folks. Study subjects who walked more than 1.8 miles a day have faster brain processing speed, better working memory for quick decisions, and better memory consolidation than inactive folks. The bilateral hippocampal volume in the active group was 12 percent more than that of the less active group. In his book The Real Happy Pill, Swedish researcher Dr. Anders Hansen reports that just taking a daily walk can reduce your risk of dementia by 40 percent.

The popular notion that walking helps with creative thinking and problem-solving has been strongly borne out by research. A prominent Stanford University study revealed that walking can increase creative output by an astonishing 60 percent. Walking stimulates something called divergent thinking, which allows you to ponder numerous scenarios and solutions in a free-flowing manner. Researchers speculate that walking challenges executive function with the dual task of walking and thinking, which may spur a boost in creativity by “relaxing inhibitory competition among memories and allowing ideas with low levels of activation to push through.” I can confidently say that I’ve done some of my best “writing” on long hikes. Reflecting on my projects from a distance has stimulated fresh ideas and perspectives that I jump on as soon as I return to the keyboard.

Mental Health

Walking helps alleviate depression symptoms and contributes to improved quality of life scores. A three-phase study published by the American Psychological Association showed that a twelve-minute walk delivered a boost in happiness, energy, focus, and self-confidence in comparison to sitting, even when participants weren’t interested in walking and had no expectation of such an effect.

Walking in nature has particularly potent mental health benefits, as evidenced by the increasing popularity of forest bathing in Japan and even in the United States. Strolling through nature has been proved to prompt a reduction in stress hormones, boost immune function, alleviate depressive symptoms, and curb rumination, which is considered destructive behavior. Doctors are now prescribing forest bathing as a legitimate treatment for a variety of mental and physical health conditions.

Fat Metabolism

Walking trains your body to efficiently burn free fatty acids for fuel. It’s low-intensity, so it uses fat as its predominant energy source, but it is far more metabolically demanding than sitting. Metabolic stimulation from walking and other low-level, purely aerobic activities helps you burn fat twenty-four hours a day and stabilizes mood, energy levels, blood glucose, and appetite.

A Harvard University study revealed that an hour a day of brisk walking minimizes the influence of obesity-promoting genes. Studies conducted at the University of Exeter showed that a mere fifteen-minute stroll can reduce both cravings and the intake of chocolate and other sweets.

Immune Function

Regular walking increases blood circulation, delivers anti-inflammatory benefits, counters the inflammatory effects of sitting, and strengthens your antibodies. Just a few minutes of walking increases the number of immune cells in your leukocytes and boosts white blood cell production, making you more resilient against cold and flu.

One study of 1,000 subjects showed a 43 percent reduction in sick days among those who walked a minimum of twenty minutes a day five days a week.

Disease Prevention

Assorted studies reveal that everyday walking can greatly reduce the risk of heart disease and strokes. It can also minimize hospitalizations and the duration of hospital stays, lower blood pressure and resting heart rate, and reduce diabetes risk.

A six-year study conducted at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill involving more than 16,000 women ages sixty and up revealed a 32 percent decrease in disease risk among subjects who walked at least two thousand steps a day. Every increase of 1,000 steps a day was associated with a 28 percent decrease in mortality risk. Interestingly, the health and disease prevention benefits of walking seem to plateau at 4,500 steps a day. This suggests that we should focus on finding small opportunities to increase daily walking and not get discouraged about falling short of the arbitrary ten-thousand-step edict.

Musculoskeletal Function

Walking strengthens muscles, bones, joints, and connective tissue. This reduces the risk of falling, which is the leading cause of injury and death in Americans over the age of 65. Walking also builds a foundation that enables you to engage in brief, explosive high-intensity exercise that might otherwise be too difficult for unfit individuals to attempt.

Regular walking also helps alleviate arthritis pain and reduces the likelihood of developing arthritis by keeping joints and connective tissue well lubricated. Walking with minimalist footwear and using proper form can help you reorganize faulty biomechanics and become more efficient. This can help you naturally and safely alleviate chronic conditions such as foot and low back pain.

Mitochondrial Function

Walking may not give you the immediate sense that you’re on your way to awesome fitness, but it’s an incredibly effective way to increase the number of oxidative enzymes inside your mitochondria. Exercising below fat max heart rate still provides sufficient oxygen to stimulate lots of mitochondria, strengthening them in the process. The oxidative enzymes in your mitochondria improve the metabolic function of your skeletal muscles, boosting fat and carbohydrate metabolism and improving the rate of adenosine triphosphate energy production. Having abundant oxidative enzymes improves performance and provides greater protection against oxidative stress at all exercise intensities.

Unlike low-level aerobic exercise, which involves plenty of oxygen and lots of mitochondria, high-intensity exercise will burn glucose without the need to involve mitochondria—this is known as anaerobic metabolism. You’re in a hurry (literally!), so you just need some energy—lots of energy—quickly, and you can’t go to the trouble to burn energy cleanly and efficiently. Remember the contrasting campfires—the glowing logs of aerobic metabolism and the twigs and newspaper of anaerobic metabolism. When you go anaerobic, you generate ATP more quickly, but you also generate more free radicals, lactic acid, and elevated ammonia levels in the blood because of the disassembling and deamination of cellular proteins. This is why it takes longer to recover from a sprint workout than a walk.

Well-functioning mitochondria can help manage the free-radical load resulting from intense exercise by spreading the burden to lots of other mitochondria. Understand that the cellular stress of high-intensity exercise also stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis in its aftermath. However, it does so by lighting up completely different message-signaling pathways from the ones aerobic activity activates. Both low-and high-intensity exercise turn on a “master switch” called PgC1α, which triggers a favorable rise in mitochondrial density and oxidative enzyme activity. So we have an urgent need to engage in both low-intensity cardio and high-intensity strength and sprint workouts for maximum mitochondrial health.

Your exercise patterns are a key driver of mitochondrial health, but diet and other lifestyle factors also exert a big influence. If an unfit, inactive person eats too many carbohydrates, this promotes a pattern of bypassing mitochondria and burning mostly sugar—like an inefficient power plant that burns coal and spews smoke. The same thing happens when you engage in chronic cardio, which can damage mitochondria and promote sugar burning even after you’ve finished one of those depleting workouts. In these cases, mitochondria can atrophy or become dysfunctional. This makes you prone to oxidative damage not only from exercise stress but also from all forms of life stress.

By contrast, a healthy aerobic system turns you into a high-production solar power plant made up of capillaries and mitochondria. It enables mitochondrial biogenesis to occur from anaerobic activity, too. That’s right: walking supports your performance and recovery from explosive activity such as sprinting and lifting weights as well as endurance performance at high intensities.