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WALKING

An exploration of walking lead by Maciej Banach from the Medical University of Lodz in Poland has drawn data from 17 previous studies to follow 226.889 people from a variety of world regions over a period of seven years. The findings suggest that daily walking has positive outcomes ‘even walking as few as 4,000 steps a day may reduce your risk of dying from any cause’ and ‘some 2,500 steps a day reduced the risk of dying from cardio vascular disease’.

According to WHO insufficient physical activity is now the forth most frequent cause of death in the world.’ James Leiper of the British Heart Foundations says ‘This research shows us just how good walking is for our health’, and he  then points out that ‘it doesn’t require special equipment of training and you can do it almost anywhere.’

Shane O’Mara a neuroscientist from Trinity College Dublin has written in his book ‘In Praise of Walking “that walkers have lower rates of depression, possibly because they are using the same areas of the brain that support learning, memory and cognition”. He refers to a 20 year study which reported “that those who moved least showed malign personality traits” 

His explanation concludes that “Whilst walking we need to keep looking around us and recalibrating our location with visual clues.... whilst this is going on in the background, our social brains are working to predict which direction others will take so that we avoid collision”. “Robots find crossing the road very difficult but our brains have been solving this and similar problems for thousands of years”.  

So whilst some people think that walking is not proper exercise, he recounts that “walking together is one of life’s great pleasures and it makes us healthier, happier and brainer“.”Our brain evolved to support movement and, therefore, if we stop moving about, it won’t work as well”.