Want to dodge diabetes? Walk. Want to strengthen your heart? Walk. Want to lower your risk of breast or colorectal cancer? Walk.
Growing evidence suggests that taking a brisk walk every day — or at least on most days — can also shore up your brain, elevate your mood, and increase your mobility. It may even lengthen your life.
7 reasons to lace up your sneakers
1. Build a bigger, sharper brain: Walking definitely affects the brains of adults in their 60’s 70’s and 80’s. Older folks who walk more, like a mile to two miles a day tend to have about 35 percent lower rate of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, says Arthur Kramer, University of Illinois, psychologist. And you don’t have to speed walk. The goal is to get adults moving.
2. Live longer: Americans typically spends two-thirds of their day sitting. That is equivalent to almost two full-time jobs a week. It is a lot sitting. And it has a really negative effect on health, reports the National Cancer Institute. What if you replaced just one hour of sitting each day with walking or with routine chores that require standing or moving around?
Colleagues of Cancer Institute tried to answer the question by tracking 150,000 people who filled out a questionnaire about how active they were. Nearly half were inactive — physically active less than two hours a day. In this study, increased activity helped people who started out active. For at least two hours a day, those who did one more hour of exercise, usually walking, cut their risk of dying by about 10 percent.
3. Ease your aching knees: Mobility is really key as we age. When you lose your mobility, you lose your independence and things can go downhill quickly. The objective of the Snow Biomechanics Laboratory at Wake Forest is to help people restore some of their mobility lost because of osteoarthritis and improve their quality of life.
You can do that with an exercise like walking. Walking for 40 to 60 minutes three to five times a week can reduce the pain of arthritic knees by about 30 percent, and if you combine walking with weight loss, the reduction in pain can be up to 50 percent. Increasing your walking speed when you are older is a big deal because it helps maintain your mobility.
4. Improve your mood: Walking for exercise can help people who have been diagnosed with mild or moderate depression as much as drugs or psychotherapy sessions. In one study at Iowa State University, overweight, sedentary people with mild to moderate depression were assigned to do aerobic exercise on a treadmill or stationary bike or do stretching exercises for around 80 minutes a week. Half of those doing aerobic exercise were no longer depressed. Like psychotherapy, exercise also helps patients feel they have regained some control of their lives.
5. Lower your risk of cancer: People who are more physically active, including those who walk for exercise, are less likely to develop one of the major cancers, say researchers of the University of Calgary in Canada. There is confident evidence that physical activity can reduce the risk of breast, colorectal and endometrial cancers.
Even if someone hasn’t been physically active before in their lives, they can still reduce their risk of those cancers by doing moderate-intensity activity like brisk walking. Walking may also help cancer patients. Physical activity can be of benefit to people who have breast of colorectal cancer. It can help them recover more quickly after their treatments and it improves their quality of life.
How might exercise effect cancer? For starters, it can help people stay lean. Excess weight increases the risk of cancers of the colon, esophagus, kidney, uterus, pancreas, and in postmenopausal women, of the breast. Exercise also empowers people. They can take control over their lives a bit more. And it doesn’t have to be something complicated — just walking as much as you can.
6. Strengthen your heart: A large number of studies have consistently demonstrated that activity reduces the risk of heart attack, stroke, sudden cardiac death, atrial figuration, and congestive heart failure. (Harvard School of Public Health).
Ideally, the greater the intensity of physical activity, the better. But less intensity does not mean no benefit. Walking around the block is better for your heart than sitting around the house. Don’t worry if you cannot do too much at one time. It is the total amount that matters.
If you have time to for only a half-hour brisk walk during lunch and then another half hour at the end of the day, you will get the same benefit as taking an hour-long walk. Walking helps the heart pump more efficiently and improves the strength of the heart and the way blood vessels respond to increased demands on the heart.
While walking is the most natural way to begin to exercise, you can do whatever you enjoy: sports, going to the gym, social activities like dancing, or join a walking group during a daily routine.
7. Dodge diabetes: If people don’t stay physically active as they get older, their muscles become insulin resistant. That means their insulin does a poor job of moving blood sugar into their muscle cells. And when people reach their 70s, the pancreas doesn’t work as well as it used to, so insulin becomes sluggish. (George Washington University)
With less-elevated insulin, blood sugar levels stay elevated for a longer time after a meal. Exercise is very effective at improving insulin sensitivity in the muscles. Exercise when it is needed the most, about a half hour after people finish eating when digested food gets absorbed into the bloodstream, the time to use muscle contractions to help clear glucose from the blood.
If you can consistently walk briskly for 45 minutes to an hour a day, it would train your muscles to clear glucose more efficiently. Walking consistently may delay the onset of type 2 diabetes.