THE BENEFITS OF WALKING
One simple activity can transform your mood and help mend your body. It makes your mind more creative, keeps your brain younger and even improves your gut health. Neuroscientist Shane O’Mara explains the many benefits of walking
It can transform your mood, mend your body and keep your mind youthful. Neuroscientist Shane O’Mara reveals the many, sometimes surprising, benefits of walking.
What is it that makes us human? Is there a particular attribute that makes us different to all other living creatures? Language usually comes top of the list, as does our use of elaborate tools. We humans have an utterly unique propensity to cook our food. We also make an exceptional investment in our children and adolescents, raising and caring for them for extended periods – a commitment far greater than any other species makes.
One entry, however, is often omitted from the list. One of our key and extraordinary adaptations – an alteration to our biology aiding our survival – is regularly overlooked in the popular mind. It is common to all the adaptations just mentioned, and to many more. This is our ability to walk, and especially to walk upright on our own two feet with our head aloft – an adaptation known as bipedalism.
Walking upright makes our minds mobile, and our mobile brains and bodies have marched to the far horizons of our planet. We conquered the world by walking out of Africa, probably in multiple waves, in family groups and in tribes.
Our upright posture has changed our relationship to the world, including our social world. Walking makes us social, by freeing our hands for tools, to carry food, weapons and children, and for gestures: movements that allow us to signal meaning to others. Most other land animals walk on four limbs – the quadrupeds. Some have even more limbs; an adult centipede can have between 30 and 354 legs. A few animals, such as birds, walk on two legs, but they lack knees, hands – and culture.
WHY DON’T WE WALK?
Humans owe a lot to their capacity to walk upright. And yet, in the western world, most of us now walk very little. Why?
We humans have inherited two fundamental drives from our ancestors: we must source energy to live – we must find food – and we must conserve energy for when food is in short supply. We’ve solved the first problem in the modern world – cheap food is everywhere. But we have also used our big brains to solve the problem of conserving energy, by designing movement out of our world.
In the late-19th century, male day labourers in London, for example, regularly walked about six to eight miles per day (nine to 13km), to and from work. By contrast, 21st-century adults in high-income countries typically walk only about 4,000 to 5,000 steps (about two to three miles) per day. In contrast, the average 80-year-old Tsimané forager-farmer in the Bolivian jungle, living a non-mechanised ‘ancestral’ lifestyle, walks everywhere and has cardiac health similar to an average westerner 25 years younger. The emerging science is giving us a clear picture: regular walking confers enduring and substantial benefits on individuals, and on society at large.
MOVEMENT MENDS US
Of course, we all know that moving is good for us. The more physically active you are, the healthier you are likely to be. But why?
Let’s start somewhere simple: your chair. You’re likely to spend many hours per day seated – this is what modern lifestyles have done to us. When you’re seated, your brain doesn’t have to work too hard to keep you upright. The chairback and seat does a lot of work for you. But when you stand up and you start walking, there are lots of measurable, and positive, changes in brain and body.
While walking, your brain must maintain balance. Draw an imaginary line from the outer corner of your eye to your ear canal. The brain works to maintain this line approximately parallel to the ground beneath your feet while you are walking, no matter the surface. Don’t believe me? Have a look at John Cleese doing his Ministry of Silly Walks act. Don’t look at his legs. Look at the line from his eye to ear. You’ll see, no matter what he does with his feet and legs, Cleese mostly maintains this line parallel to the ground beneath his feet.
“The science gives us a clear picture: regular walking confers substantial benefits”