1. Lowers Your Risk of Stroke
Studies indicate that regularly walking can drastically reduce your risk of stroke. In a study that examined 11,130 males who graduated from Harvard University between 1916 and 1950, researchers found that briskly walking for an hour a day, five days a week can decrease your risk of having a stroke by nearly half. If that’s too much walking for you, researchers discovered that even walking for just 30 minutes a day, five days a week can shrink your risk of having a stroke by 24 percent. Based on their findings, the researchers concluded that engaging in physical activities that burn 1,000 to 2,000 calories a week lowers the risk of having a stroke by 24 percent, and participating in physical activities that burn 2,000 to 3,000 calories a week reduces the risk of having a stroke by 46 percent.
In another study that examined the exercise habits of 39,315 females whose average age was 54, researchers found that women who walked three or more miles per hour reduced their risk of having a stroke by 37 percent, and women who walked two or more hours per week cut their risk of having a stroke by 30 percent. Considering that strokes are responsible for more than 150,000 deaths a year in the United States, regularly walking is one step to staying alive and healthy.
2. Boosts Your Memory
Not only can walking decrease your risk of having a stroke, it can also increase the size of your brain. According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, walking three times a week can increase the size of your hippocampus, the part of the brain that controls memory and the first area to be destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease.
In the study, researchers examined 120 men and women between the ages of 55 and 80 who walked briskly for 40 minutes, three times a week. After a year of studying the participants, researchers scanned their brains and found that the participants’ hippocampi had grown by up to two percent.
“This may sound like it is a modest amount but it’s like reversing the age clock by a couple of years,” lead researcher Dr. Kirk Erickson said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference. Although walking isn’t a cure-all to dementia, it seems to be an effective way to keep your brain sharp, Dr. Erickson explained.
Other studies have produced similar findings: according to a study from the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville, “men between the ages of 71 and 93 who walked more than a quarter of a mile per day had half the incidence of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, compared to those who walked less.” In another study conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, researchers found that frequent walking can stall age-related memory decline. The researchers examined 6,000 women, ages 65 and older, and discovered that women who walked “2.5 miles per day had a 17-percent decline in memory, as opposed to a 25-percent decline in women who walked less than a half-mile per week.”
3. Increases Your Lifespan
In addition to lowering your risk of stroke and boosting your memory, walking regularly can actually make you live longer. According to a study published in the journal PLoS Medicine, you can add more than seven years onto your life by walking just 2.5 hours a week. Don’t want to walk that much? That’s okay, because researchers found that briskly walking even half that amount—for only 75 minutes a week—can increase your lifespan by almost two years.
Researchers discovered these findings by gathering participants’ self-reported data on their physical activities and measuring the BMIs of almost 650,000 people over the age of 40. Using this and other information, the researchers calculated the participants’ life expectancies that were associated with their levels of physical activity.
In the study, the participants who had the greatest gains were those of a healthy weight; however, researchers found that “people of a healthy weight who didn’t exercise could expect to die 3.1 years earlier than obese people who did stay active.” So being skinny doesn’t automatically translate into being healthy, as many people may assume.