Brain Boost

You may have already heard that walking for thirty to sixty minutes each day at least five days a week improves cardiovascular health and reduces the risk of developing diseases like cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, anxiety and depression. Walking keeps you fit—your heart pumps to circulate blood, your muscles engage to keep you upright and moving, and your bones gradually strengthen to provide skeletal support. As you build strength, you are also reducing stress, blood pressure and levels of LDL or “bad” cholesterol. It is quite amazing to think that all of this happens during such a routine activity!

But that’s not all. While heart and bone health are extremely important, new studies show that walking actually enhances the health of our brains as well! As we age in late adulthood, the volume of gray matter in our brains steadily decreases. This decline in brain volume often precedes the decline in brain health that manifests as memory loss and dementia. In a recent study, researchers found that those individuals who walked the furthest distance each week had the largest gray matter volume 9 years later! More importantly, this greater gray matter volume reduced the risk for developing cognitive impairment by half.

Not only does walking reduce the risk of cognitive decline, it also improves your ability to think and process information. Evidence indicates that regular aerobic activity improves what are called our executive functions. Executive functions are a collection of brain processes that allow us to initiate and stop actions, to monitor and change behavior as needed, and to plan future behavior when presented with new situations and environments. In recent scientific studies, researchers have shown that moderate walking for approximately 1 hour, three days each week increases the volume of your brain, improves the function of certain brain structures, enhances connections in different regions of the brain, and elevates performance on cognitive tasks. Here is scientific evidence for the link between a strong, healthy body and a strong, healthy mind—both of which can be achieved by putting one foot in front of the other!